Baby Birdies
by BuckeyeBelle
Summary: Their cadet cruise marks the beginning of adult adventures and responsibilities for Annabelle Lennox and her friends. Humanity takes its first steps into a galaxy beginning to recover from millennia of devastating civil war. A side story to Come on up for the Rising.
1. Embarkation Day

(Chapter 1—Embarkation Day)

(A.N. Transformers belongs to Hasbro and whoever they have allowed the rights to it, which certainly doesn't include me. No money has been made from this fanfic and no copyright infringement is intended. All I own are my OCs.

This is a side story to "Come on up for the Rising," taking place just before the first chapter of the epilogue. This story properly wouldn't be higher than T for some language, but I've rated it M because CouftR is, and this won't make sense unless you have read that one first.

A big thanks to Vivienne Grainger for the beta, and for her interpretation of Smokescreen, who appears in the fourth story arc.

I have attempted to define military acronyms and terms when they first appear, when the context permits. /A.N.)

(2025-Diego Garcia, deep space)

The cadet barracks at the Earth Defense Force Academy had been buzzing since 0400. Anna adjusted her cover to just the right angle over her eyes as she got ready to leave.

Today was Embarkation Day, when this year's graduating seniors began their three month long senior cruise. Her cohort had been assigned to the _EDS Chicago. _It would be the _Chicago's _shakedown cruise after her year-long refit; she was virtually a new ship with full carrier status, home to the 119th Wolf Pack Squadron. Anna's cohort had had been assigned the posting so that Firefly and Skyrocket could get experience flying with a squadron off a carrier.

The whole senior class assembled in the commons, the humans a sea of pressed and polished cadet blue uniforms, the bots' armor buffed to a mirror finish. As Sara Lennox went down the line of cadets, in her turn Anna presented her weapon for inspection. Sara took a moment longer to look for anything at all out of place. There was absolutely nothing to mark off. Not a flicker of pride or anything else showed in Sara's steel gaze. Anna's eyes remained straight ahead as Sara moved on down the line.

After the inspection ceremony concluded, the cadets took up their duffels and rifles and marched from the Academy to the airfield, where the shuttles were waiting to take them up to the Highport on Mjolnir.

The sidewalks along the parade route were lined with family and friends who turned out to wish them well. Anna saw her dad—her mother, of course, led the parade; Will was with Star's family.

One of the traditions growing up around the Academy was that the embarking seniors' friends and family fell in behind the cadet corps and accompanied them to the airfield. Whether they were in the military or civilians, today they were here only to support their cadet.

When they reached the airfield, Sara turned command over to her second and went over to stand with her family in support of her daughter and niece. It was the first time the relationship between them had been acknowledged. Before that, Anna and Star had just been two more cadets.

There was no better way that Sara could have expressed her confidence and pride in them during their years here than by expecting no less of them than their classmates, often demanding more.

They were called forward by units and assigned to one of the three shuttles waiting to carry them to the Fleet. Once they were aboard, the bots hurried to their assigned spots, while the humans changed into their spacesuits, stowed their gear, and strapped in.

Star magna-locked in place when the alarm sounded. A blond woman whose space suit was the dark blue of the EDF, and displayed several unit patches detailing her service history, stood in the hatch to the next bay. "All right, you baby birdies, listen up! I'm Lieutenant Shana Coriell of the EDF by way of the United States Air Force! Welcome to the real life fraggin' Fleet! You're here to learn and in the fleet we learn by doing. That means you are going to be working a full joor shift every day beginning NOW! After that you will have another joor of academic or practical work, which will be assigned by your detail supervisor.

"Listen up! Out in the black you do not get do-overs or points for effort. Your life and the lives of your shipmates could depend on the successful completion of any task that you may be assigned. Your life and the lives of your shipmates may at any time depend on being where you are supposed to be when you are supposed to be there! When you are not on duty, you will be in your assigned off duty areas, is that understood?"

They all shouted, "SIR, YES SIR!"

"When I call your name you will reply with 'Present.' Cadet Dragonfly!"

"Present!"

"Cadet Earthshaker!"

"Present!"

"Cadet Firecracker!"

"Present!"

"Cadet Lennox!"

"Present!"

"Cadet Nightstar!"

"Present!"

"Cadet Parker!"

"Present!"

"Cadet Skyrocket!"

Silence.

"CADET SKYROCKET! Get your helm outta your aft and pay attention!"

The young seeker had been distracted by the shuttle's pre-flight preparations. He jumped so hard he rattled when the lieutenant shouted. "Sir, yes sir! Present!"

A passing Captain with pilot's wings on his spacesuit muttered as he passed by, "Foxtrot Bravo Bravos!"

The loudspeaker announced, "Lift in one minute!"

Coriell took the nearest unoccupied seat and fastened her restraints. "When we arrive at the _Shytown, _organics will seal your suits and gather your gear. You will all then disembark from the shuttle, proceed straight ahead and halt as soon as you cross the double yellow line. You will remain there until you are told where to proceed! Organics will keep your suits pressurized until you are told that it is safe to remove your helmets."

"Sir, yes sir!"

The shuttle's engines roared and the craft rode a column of fire into the clear blue sky. The burn stopped and they experienced weightlessness for the first time. Coriell opened her restraints and kicked off with the casual grace of one experienced in zero-gee. She made sure all of them had come through the liftoff safely, then returned to her place and strapped back in for docking. "Bay Alfa-Niner secure for docking!" she reported over her comm unit.

Presently there was a loud metallic boom as the shuttle magna-locked to one of the _Chicago's _docking ports. Anna grabbed her belongings, then followed the rest of her team off the shuttle, entering the busy flight deck. Because there was always a serious chance of decompression on that deck any time ships were docking and undocking, suits were required at all times. They were required to use magnetics to remain on the deck, but experienced spacefarers were sailing around the bay overhead, often moving sealed containers of all sorts as they flew.

The cadets reached the area where they were supposed to await further instructions.

A large group of people, including the man who had called them FBBs, whatever that was, came off the ramp laughing and joking, swaggering across the deck like they owned the place. Now the cadets noticed that the backs of these organics' suits sported the head of a howling wolf, with the legend "119th Squadron" above it, and "Wolf Pack" below.

These were the pilots who had flown with the seekers in the Battle of Virginia.

Before Virginia, only two pilots had ever survived a dogfight with a seeker. Those two now flew for NEST. Now there were six more, and three of them were aces. And they had just walked past. Skyrocket and Dragonfly were both about to _bounce._

The Wolf Pack didn't pay any attention to them as headed for their quarters, carrying on about something they had gotten into down on Diego.

Coriell kicked off from the docking port to a ladder nearby. Shaker said, "Ten-hut!" And they all snapped to. Coriell ordered them, "On my six!"

They followed her across the flight deck, which ran almost the whole length of the ship, and through an airlock. Once the last of them was through the airlock, she gave Lennox and Parker permission to unseal their suits and pulled her own helmet off. "You're all cohort, right? Even you two? I'm not even gonna ask how _that_ happened! Here's the problem. Bot berths are on the hangar deck. Human quarters are up here, but we aren't supposed to separate a cohort. That means you two are _special_. You can have human quarters up here, or you can stay with the bots in their quarters."

They looked at each other. Anna said to John, "It'd probably be easier if we were all together, and I can Velcro to a bulkhead anywhere."

"Yeah, that makes sense to me. So we go up a gangway to shower and eat, so what," John agreed.

Anna said, "Sir, we would prefer to be assigned to our unit's quarters!"

Coriell nodded, pleased with their attitude. "This way."

The berthroom they were assigned had six berths, and plenty of Velcro panels on the bulkheads. Everything else, they could improvise. Coriell told them where to find the nearest head and shower facilities, then added, "Stow your gear. These three areas are the only places where you will remove your suits. In the head or the showers, you will confirm that the cubicle is sealed before doing so. You will keep them within reach at all times.

"This is the weapons locker. At any time your weapons are not required for your duties, you will secure them here. That includes any weapons that you bots normally subspace. Secure all your gear now. I'll be back in fifteen."

They all came to attention as the LT left the bay, then hurried to secure everything. For lack of personal lockers, John and Anna put their duffels in an equipment locker. They had just enough time to make a trip to the head before they had to be ready to go.

Coriell took them on a tour of the ship, familiarizing them with the layout and where the various duty stations were located. Then she checked a small datapad for their assignments. "Skyrocket, Dragonfly, report to Lieutenant Colonel Garner on the Hangar Deck. A word to the wise, don't smart off and _pay attention._ Garner is the Commander, Air Group. For those former ground-pounders among us, we usually call that person the CAG. He's been flying longer than you've been alive, and he's forgot more than you know about staying online out there. Get outta here."

"Sir, yes sir!" The twins took off.

"Parker, report to Major Vance, our CMO, in her office in medbay. Expect her to put you to work, but before this flight is over, you'll know a shipboard medbay inside and out."

"Sir, yes sir!" He exchanged a glance with Shaker and then headed for the gangway.

Coriell consulted her datapad again. "Firecracker and Nightstar. Brother and sister? One of these days when we get a spare five minutes, we're going to sit down and you're going to explain Cybertronian unit structure to me. The two of you report to Chief Engineer Crystallia at Power Station Alfa. It's on the hangar deck aft of the portside hold."

They gave the expected universal reply to everything and went where they were told.

Coriell took Shaker and Anna with her to communications and left them in the care and custody of the ship's sensors and communications officer, a tall blond Russian named Lt. Gregorov.

"Gregori Ivanovitch! Here are your baby birdies. Cadet Lennox and Cadet Earthshaker."

"Welcome aboard. Have you ever punched down cable for wireless access points?"

Neither of them had, but they figured they were about to.

That was the first of many days when they learned they were going to be kept out of trouble by being made, and kept, insanely busy. Their supervisors took their jobs seriously, often lecturing or quizzing them while they worked side by side. They had expected to swab decks and peel potatoes, and there was always plenty of that kind of work, but mostly they were learning while they were pulling their own weight. When they finally got back to their berth room after their duty shifts, they were usually too tired to do anything but rest.

John had worked in the medbay with Ratchet and his mother, and that had been a lot of hard work, but he had been just a candy-striper then. He had emptied bedpans, tended non-secured supply lockers, mopped and scrubbed and swept up, as well as handing her instruments in surgery. Now that he had qualified as an EMT-B for both humans and Cybertronians, he could do a lot more hands-on work with patients. He saw a lot of the usual shipboard dings and scratches that went with the territory aboard ship in zero gravity, and wondered from time to time how he would handle a true emergency.

Right now, though, he was becoming expert in what happened when loads shifted as the ship changed vector or accelerated, someone slipped on soap or cleanser, or a thumb made the acquaintance of a hammer. One fellow reported with a toothache. A bag of food split open while being transferred from the microwave, and a cook presented with a burned hand.

The worst injury that John saw after having worked there for a week was a dislocated shoulder when a young airman got an abrupt reminder that "weightless" didn't mean "without mass."

John had just finished triage on the guy with the dislocated shoulder when CMO Vance showed up with a healer-trainee femme named Whitefire, who was doing a rotation on shipboard. Vance ordered her to take a scan of the groaning airman's injury, and checked the results on the datapad she carried.

Vance handed the pad to John, then abruptly leaned into the airman's back and pulled sharply on his arm. It went back into place with a loud snap that made both John and Whitefire flinch, and made the airman howl. _Then _she gave the kid something for the pain. "Next time it could be your neck, afthead! I don't want you back in here for something this stupid, you got that, Airman?"

"Sir, yes sir!"

She took her datapad back and scribbled orders on it. "Go back to your rack and sleep that off. When you wake up, come back down here and get it checked again. You'll be on light duty for a while, till I'm convinced you won't pop it back out and tear the hell outta your rotator cuff the next time."

Still blinking back tears, the airman left. Vance shook her head. "Too fraggin' many ways for idiots to kill themselves out here."

John went back to work sterilizing the exam room for the next patient. He decided that all told, if he did something dumb and got hurt, he'd rather have Ratchet fix it. Ratchet wouldn't throw a wrench at a human. Vance had no such limitations.

The CAG threw Dragonfly and Skyrocket right into the ship's Combat Air Patrol, flying in a trine with them. They soon learned that with Garner's F-27 leveling the field, they were no match for his skill and experience no matter how much raw talent they had. He also had an uncanny understanding of seeker capabilities and tactics, one reason why his unit had been so successful during the Battle of Virginia.

As they stood in the hangar bay one day after patrol, he gave the two seekers a long look. "You two are still in youngling frames, right?"

"Yes, sir," Dragonfly confirmed. "I won't get much bigger; I'll probably be ready for my last growth cycle soon. Skyrocket will, so it will be another year or two for him."

"Hmm. Think you'll get big enough to transscan an F-27?"

"It would be a stretch, sir. Rocket will."

"OK. Come here, I want to show you something."

They followed him across the bay to the last slip in the hangar bay. The ship there was half the size of an F-27, but still clearly heavily influenced by Cybertronian technology. "That's an F-28. It's designated as a fighter, because it _is _one. It's lightly armored, but it's the fastest fighter we've got. With a pilot who can keep up with it, it can outfly anything in the sky. It's intended as a scout or AWACS, but we use it for that and everything else too. You might want to consider that airframe if it's the right size for you."

"Yes, sir!" Her optics brightened as she stepped closer. She had expected to get stuck with something like a business jet as Corona had, but this looked _much_ more desirable. An AWACS plane, which stood for Airborne Warning and Control System, was designed to use its sensors and comms to serve as a combat operations "eye in the sky." She filed away a transscan and determined how much more mass she would need to use it; the result was promising.

Outwardly, she was calm and professional, but the CAG would never know that over their sibling bond she and Rocket were screeching like a couple of workbots that got into the high-grade.

The rest of the cadets, aside from the seekers and the medic trainee, got moved through various areas from the galley to engineering to flight ops, learning different skills and doing whatever jobs they were assigned. They all got a reputation for not being afraid of hard work, though of course individual talents meant that some rota were easier for each one than others. Anna, for instance, could dishwash and microwave with the best of them, and follow a detailed recipe. While that was the extent of her culinary talents, she was relieved that nothing more would be asked of her.

They took the usual newbie-hazing more or less in stride, laughing as loud as everyone else. Coming from the big crazy family that was their clan, they were used to it. Every ship had its little quirks and in-jokes. Several of them were sent on errands to find "Chief Master Sergeant Corbis" and give him a message of some sort. Only after a long fruitless search, being sent from place to place all over the ship, did they discover that "Chief Corbis" was actually a plush crow, the mascot of the non-commissioned officers' break room—which they discovered when they all met at the break room, much to the sergeants' amusement.

Shaker didn't let them retaliate until he had a chance to sound Coriell out about where the line was, but then the payback mission was on. He delegated the actual mission planning to Dragonfly and Skyrocket.

They found that the originators of the "Chief Corbis" prank were a pair of roommates, one of whom was a communications tech and the other a supply sergeant. Then the pair decided on a prank which should be completely harmless but extremely annoying. To pull it off, they needed a few supplies from the galley—easy enough for Anna and John to obtain the next time they pulled kitchen duty.

Firecracker found out when the two sergeants were on duty. He got the job of pulling the prank the next time he was landed with swabbing decks—which required him to use the large mopping machine, in which he could hide the prank materials. This machine scrubbed the decks without allowing water droplets to get into the air. All the corridors were swabbed frequently, to prevent grease from building up and causing an accident.

He was chosen for the job for his mods and his size: his digits transformed into fine manipulation arms, necessary for working on guns or building explosives, and he was also still small enough to fit into the sergeants' quarters.

He pulled the sheets off their racks. He first covered each mattress with plastic wrap, then spread a package of dried beans under the wrap on each rack. Then he attached several loops of tape to the plastic wrap and carefully made each rack back up, making certain that the sheets were now taped to the plastic wrap. Then he stuffed the evidence back into the scrubbing machine and continued his day's work.

When the sergeants got off duty and fell into their racks, they immediately noticed that their mattresses were somewhat less comfortable than usual. When they got up and pulled off the sheets to see what was going on, the wrap came off with the sheets and the beans were scattered all over the bay, ricocheting around in zero gravity, and leaving the two men to figure out a way to recapture them all.

Being resourceful individuals they soon hit on the idea of using a hand-held vacuum cleaner, but when they went to get it, word got out to the rest of the non-coms what was going on. Of course they found this highly amusing. By then, Firecracker had disposed of the evidence.

Brewster quickly saw leadership potential in Shaker and Anna, and made sure they spent quite a bit of time on the bridge as gofers and runners. Mostly their job was to stay out of the way, keep quiet and pay attention to whatever was going on.

The _Chicago_ was out here to do two things. First she was to visit a Cybertronian colony to see if anybot survived, determine their situation, and assess any needs they had. Secondly, she was assigned to survey a dead jump point which, if repaired and brought back on line, would bring them within range of two other colonies. After that, she would return to the Sol system and patrol for the remainder of her cruise.

Contact with the Sylura colony had been lost nearly 100 vorns, or 800 years, ago, so no one had any idea what they might find there. Sylura was a Cybertronian-style artificial planet in a system with a yellow star, two rocky planets that had provided raw materials, and a couple of gas giants. Mineral-rich asteroids occupied other orbits.

If Sylura was inhabited, they hoped for trade with the survivors. If it wasn't, future recolonization was a possibility.

The day before they reached Sylura, the whole ship was buzzing with excitement. It was Earth's first official exploration of a possibly inhabited system. Alpha Centauri and Barnard's Star had been the first systems explored, but they were known to be uninhabited before anyone got there. The bots, on the other hand, were anxious to find out what had happened to people that they or their clan had known there long ago.

Coriell came in before lights out to brief the cadets. "We have some great news. Comms picked up radio traffic from insystem, and they answered our hail. Major Crystallia has been talking with their leaders. There are about one hundred survivors plus stragglers that we'll need to find. We've been assigned an area to search, if nothing changes between now and the time we make planetfall next joor. There's no atmosphere, so do full maintenance on your suits. I want both of you carrying a full load of air tanks. There's only about .3 G so the extra tanks shouldn't be much of a problem."

After the LT left, Anna got out of her suit and spread it out on the deck, going through the complicated checklist of a full inspection. Beside her, John did the same. "A hundred-some survivors. That's great, isn't it?"

"Sounds like they're in as bad a shape as the miners," Shaker replied. "They'll need stuff we ain't got. And why would there be stragglers we'd have to find? I got a feelin' somethin' ain't right."

Star nodded. Where Shaker was concerned, slow didn't mean stupid. His instincts were usually good. "Maybe you and I should subspace a few extra air tanks, Shaker," she suggested.

He nodded. "I'll go see if Major Crystallia can spare me some."

The engineer was more than happy to give him a few extra, as well as a box of water refills. It seemed to her that many humans were slow to take advantage of bots' subspace holds. Most of them had extra room. There was no reason not to carry extra vital supplies; this group of cadets seemed better than some of their elders at using each others' abilities.

Dragonfly tried to settle herself on her berth, shifting her weight in a way that looked very uncomfortable to Anna. "Are you all right?"

"I will be. Remember your wisdom tooth?"

Anna winced in sympathy. "Don't remind me, I still have to cut three more. Can I do anything?"

Dragonfly shook her head miserably and rearranged her wings again. Anna didn't seem to recall Star having so much discomfort with either of her growth phases, but then some people didn't even seem to notice wisdom teeth coming in, either.

At lights out, Anna kicked off from the deck to stick her sleeping bag high on the bulkhead, out of the bots' way if there was an alarm in the middle of the night. John found his own spot.

Dragonfly shifted on her berth. Her wings were tender and she couldn't seem to get comfortable no matter what she did. Seekers liked to rest in alt form, but she could only do that in the hangar, and she never had been able to recharge out in the open. It reminded her too much of old terrors from their time with the Decepticons. She finally settled on her front, helm on her arms.

A bulky form made himself comfortable beside her—Shaker. She smiled. ::What's the matter, Dragonfly?::

::Just growing. Vance is good, but she's not Ratchet. Everything that's integrating either hurts or itches.::

::Maybe we oughta go down there and tell 'er to do it right this time!::

::I don't think she's got the equipment in a shipboard medbay to do the really fine work. It will self repair.::

Very gently, Shaker stroked her wings as he had when they were kids. After a little while she purred softly as she relaxed and drifted toward recharge. ::Shaker, you always did take good care of me.::

::Always will, Dragonfly, always will,:: he promised. ::Ya better get some recharge, t'morrow's gonna be a big day.::

::You too.::

::Yeah, I will.::

He waited until he was sure she was recharging before he went back to his own berth.

The next morning everyone managed to get a look out a viewport as they orbited Sylura. They were close enough to see that it was a metal world, an artificial planet like Cybertron. The cadets were excited about seeing something out of legend, but the older bots in the crew who remembered Cybertron had a little piece of home given back to them.

Everyone was ordered to secure for landing. The cadets went back to their quarters and the bots magna-locked to their berths. Shaker transformed to his bulldozer alt before he locked down. He was thankful that he'd had Ratchet modify his alt form so he could do that, because it gave John and Anna a safe place to ride out landings in bot-specific areas of the ship. They got in his cab and fastened their seat belts.

Once the ship landed, Coriell joined them. "Stay sharp out there," she ordered.

"Yes, sir," was Shaker's quiet rumbling reply.

The crew gathered in the docking bay, watching in excitement as the huge hatch slowly lowered. The _Chicago_ rarely landed anywhere; she was not designed for atmospheric operations. But an airless, artificial world like the Sylura colony was perfect for her. The ramp finally rested on the metal plates of the landing pad.

They looked around at the surrounding towers. In this part of the colony, they were all in good repair and well-lighted. Crystallia and a few others who had lived on Cybertron before the war took its toll looked around with mingled longing and sorrow.

Brewster didn't want to let that go on too long. He gave the order to move out.

All hell broke loose when the space-suited humans came down the ramp, but not for any of the reasons they expected. A crowd of about twenty bots waited for the ship to land, anxious to greet others of their people after so long. It was immediately evident, however, that their visitors weren't all bots.

As soon as that discovery spread through the crowd, Cybertronian chatter flooded the civilian frequencies.

The locals dived for cover. Some fled outright, and the others readied weapons. The bots, silent in the vacuum of an airless planet, disappeared behind anything big enough to hide them like a herd of elephants fleeing from mice.

Brewster radioed Crystallia on a private channel, ::You're the highest ranking bot officer. Talk to them and try to calm them down.::

::What am I supposed to say to them, Colonel?::

::Hell's bells, I don't know, tell them we come in peace and ask them to take us to their leader!::

The minerbot snorted, but stepped forward and held out empty servos. ::Everybot settle down! We're not going to hurt anyone! I'm Crystallia of the _Pride of Iacon. _Our ship is the _EDS_ _Chicago. _Who's in charge here?::

::I am.:: A small silver and green door-winged femme stepped forward. ::Shadowdancer of Praxus, Crystallia. What are your, er, _shipmates_ designated?::

::They are humans, indigenous to the planet Earth where we have settled.::

::Are they...organics?::

::Yes, they are. Is that some kind of a problem?::

::Er, no, of course not, it's just I've never seen one before. A lot of these bots don't even know what an organic is, and, well, they're afraid of them. They think they're some other weapon of terror that Megatron cooked up.::

::Megatron was here? What did he do?::

::Well, he wasn't here personally, but about three vorns ago, the Decepticons raided Sylura. Soundwave was in charge. They conscripted many of my people who were able to fight, filled their ship with whatever they wanted to take, and stole all our spacecraft. The rest of us expected them to hunt us down and kill us, but they just took a few bots aboard their ship and released them later. Soon we found out why. Soundwave used us to test a new virus. Everyone infected with it fled contact with other bots, except to try to infect them with the virus. After a while we were able to develop a defense against it, and now the virus can be removed from an infected bot. The trouble is catching them. There were originally seventeen victims. We recovered four and we know of two who were offlined in accidents. We believe there are eleven of them still hiding in the abandoned areas, but we've had no success in capturing them.::

::The war is over, and Megatron and Soundwave were both offlined. Did you pick up Optimus Prime's call?::

::We did, but we don't have a ship. We have what we need to survive here. I'm sorry but I wasn't going out there in comet form without warriors to protect my people, and with no more idea where we were going than a set of coordinates. If the Magnus wishes to judge me for that, then arrest me.::

Crystallia said, ::Can't see that happening. Tell your people the humans won't hurt them, then come aboard and talk to the Primes.::

The Praxian did so, then went aboard the _Chicago. _

The ramp sealed and the airlock cycled through. Crystallia and one of the humans escorted Shadowdancer to a conference room that was set up for subspace communications. Along the way, she saw her first humans who weren't wearing space suits. She stopped, scanning them with all her senses. They made a singsong noise to her companions, who replied in that same language. The human with them also removed his helm cover, and nodded to the pair they had just met.

One of them took a step forward and bowed its head respectfully, then offered a credible universal greeting. Shadowdancer knelt to offer her servo, but let the human actually make contact because she was afraid of hurting it. Its tiny servo was warm like hers. She smiled, and the little being returned the gesture.

At least, she hoped it was a gesture of friendship and not some kind of threat display.

Crystallia led her to the conference room, set up to be accessible to both the humans and bots, with a stairway leading up to a platform on one side of the table, where several small chairs were lined up.

Crystallia introduced Shadowdancer to the human with her. He was the captain of the ship, Colonel Brewster. She bowed respectfully, a gesture which he returned with the proper formality.

Crystallia offered her a language file. "This is the language known as English. It's one of their major languages and the one the fleet uses. A lot of the humans speak at least some of it. Most of the humans on board the _Chicago_ do understand our language, but their vocalizers are completely different from ours. They can't make the sounds to say much more than hello. You may distribute it if you like."

Shadowdancer scanned and installed the file, then pushed it out to the clan leaders. It would help to be able to talk to the aliens.

Crystallia got comms going. Shadowdancer knew who Optimus Prime was from her parents' stories of Old Cybertron and the Council at the start of the war. She went to one knee, and waited to be told to rise. She was terrified: her decision to disobey the call to journey to Earth had been in the best interests of her people, but she wasn't sure how he was going to take her display of initiative.

He did not seem to be angry with her when he told her to stand. She said, "I am Shadowdancer, leader of the Syluran Council, Magnus."

"You cannot have had an easy job the last several vorns. What is your situation there?"

"Magnus. I have 112 bots in three clans, including six new sparklings. We have enough energon and raw materials to survive by recycling what we have here. Everything needs repairs and has since the jump points went down, but we don't have the ability to make them ourselves. Large areas of the planet have had to be abandoned as unsafe. And then there are the ferals..."

"Ferals?"

Shadowdancer explained again about Soundwave's experimental virus and its effects on its unfortunate victims.

"Was this the reason you chose to remain there rather than coming to Earth?"

"Yes, Magnus, it was part of it. We could not abandon our family here. They can't truly fend for themselves without someone to leave energon and other supplies for them. But the main reason is that we have no ships. It would have meant bringing civilians, even younglings, a desperately long distance without any fighters to defend us. And now the situation has been complicated even further by the creation of several sparklings. We do not know anything about the world at that location. Many of us have never landed on a planet in meteor form. It was my decision to wait for more information before we set out. With respect, this is our home. We would prefer to stay, with your permission."

"If the colony is still in a condition for you to stay there safely, I see no reason why not. Your reasons for waiting were good ones. Don't be concerned about that. Captain Brewster?"

"We'll do what we can to assist the Sylurans, Optimus."

Optimus nodded, then addressed Shadowdancer. "Our situation seems to be a little better than yours, supply-wise, but at this point we only have two ships capable of carrying a large amount of cargo. Determine what you need the most urgently and we'll do our best."

"Thank you, Magnus." Shadowdancer hoped he couldn't tell that she was shaking with relief. The old council would have had a different reaction. At the very least, she would have been summoned to Cybertron to explain herself in person. But then the old council wouldn't have been so much at ease with the captain that he could be on a first-name basis with the Magnus. Clearly, there had been changes.


	2. Ferals

(Chapter 2—Ferals)

(Disclaimers in Chapter 1)

(2025—Sylura colony)

Orders came over comms for all the bots in the Chicago's crew to report to the flight deck immediately. The medical override code attached to the order prioritized it above everything but vital ship's operations. The Cybertronian cadets reported as ordered, and found a line forming in front of CMO Vance, her apprentice and a small doorwinged Syluran bot who wore a masterhealer's glyph.

There were various groans and gripes as everyone realized they were getting anti-virus programming. It was a necessary evil, of course—nobot wanted to get a virus, but it nearly always involved a reboot, and it was rarely pleasant to have a medic intrude as deeply as was necessary to check the installation afterward.

Neither Vance nor Whitefire were in the best of moods either. The antivirus code had been sent back to Earth to be picked apart by the programming team there; only after Elita Prime had thoroughly vetted it was it approved for distribution. The two _Shytown_ healers had been included via telepresence in that process, for educational purposes. They were now into their fourth joor on duty.

Shaker went first. Any bot with processor issues was always a special case when it came to programming maintenance or updates; they had to be sure the new code wouldn't conflict with any of the workarounds he used to bypass the damage. The Syluran healer stayed with him during the disorientating process of unpacking and installing the new code, and then linked in again as soon as he was far enough into the following reboot to allow it. ::Easy, mech. You're OK.::

Shaker got his bearings and said, ::Thanks, Doc.::

::No problem. All we need would be _more_ ferals running around!::

Shaker was a bit taken aback by the crusty old medic's insensitive remark—not even Ratchet would say something like that. But then, Shaker supposed Ratchet would be pretty aggravated too if he had to deal with an infection that could have been prevented by something as easy as installing an anti-virus patch.

At least _this_ mech hadn't thrown any wrenches.

Yet.

Maybe that was a skill medics taught their apprentices.

Soon after they all had the antivirus and took a few breems to recover, the cadets collected their human teammates and were sent out to search their assigned area. Coriell warned them, ::They haven't had a chance to fix anything in this area for a long time. There's no atmosphere so there isn't any rust, but you can feel the vibration from the power plant. Over time that will cause things to come apart and break down. The place is literally falling apart so watch where you step. It could be a long way down!::

Shaker asked, ::What about these ferals, LT?::

::Well, I hope they'll think baby birdies look tasty. Otherwise we'll have to chase 'em, and it looks like that'll be a _bitch.::_

Firecracker said, ::I hope that antivirus works, that's all I can say.::

::Quit bellyachin' and move out.::

Coriell let Shaker assign the team their positions and nodded in approval. Dragonfly, in her new F-28 form, was their scout. He kept Skyrocket as close cover, warning Dragonfly not to get too far ahead of them. Star and Anna took point, Shaker and Coriell followed, and John rode with Firecracker behind them. Ordinarily John rode with Shaker, but Shaker had to protect their CO, and he wanted someone wearing a sharpshooter's badge near the front. It wasn't that he expected anyone to shoot at them, he didn't know for sure that nobody would.

Firecracker knew how to bring up the rear, and if they needed his cannons he could arc his fire over their heads from anywhere in the line. John was a good marksman but he was a better lookout. If anything got on their back trail he'd spot it. And you never put your medic on the front line.

::Sir, do you know how to dismount at speed if I hafta transform in a hurry?::

Coriell thought about it. Low gee, bad surface that might hole her suit, as opposed to getting their best front-liner out there faster... ::Depends on what you mean by "at speed." I jump out of airplanes for the hell of it. But I'd rather not hit the ground from six feet up at a couple hundred miles an hour.::

He laughed. ::I'd rather not transform at a couple hundred miles an hour, LT. I ain't no ballerina.::

::What if we did run into something big and we needed you up front? Nightstar and Lennox are in the way.::

::No, sir. Star breaks right and I break left, so you'll want to come off to the left if you can. Otherwise look out for Firecracker comin' up behind us, and get behind me as quick as you can.::

::How long've you been training together?::

::Since we were kids. We just thought it was all fun and games at the time. Our parents were afraid stray 'Cons would try to kidnap us or worse, and back then, it coulda happened.::

His voice sounded distracted; she realized he was concentrating on his surroundings and had assigned the conversation a lower priority. She stopped talking, but made notes of the questions she had.

They quickly left the inhabited zone behind, and it was obvious that they had left a living city for a dying one.

There were no lights. Almost all the window glass was broken, and hatches were missing or jammed open. Junk from previous recycling missions lay by the side of the metal street. The road plates were uneven enough that they were forced to stop and transform to climb over a few rough, broken spots. Once a whole four-story building had fallen across the road. A narrow path (narrow for a bot, anyhow) had been cleared through rubble piles on either side.

Sylura hadn't died fast in battle. It was slowly starving to death. Coriell hoped they were in time to save it, but if they couldn't, these people had a place to go.

They came to an intersection that had been marked on their map. The right turn that they had been directed to take led them down into the inner levels of the planet. Coriell expected the ghosts of families to come walking out of the pitch blackness surrounding more dead buildings; the dying of a city here had run its course, leaving behind it corpses and entropy-staggered pathways, arcing along the ceilings and walls, drooping from their supporting structures. Gravity here was wreaking its will.

At one time there had been a hell of a lot more than a hundred and change people living here, she realized. But the war had happened to Sylura, some of its people taken by the 'Cons, others abandoning the colony in hopes of finding better luck someplace else. That would have been in short supply, though, in a galaxy gone crazy.

Some few had offlined for lack of basic supplies. Not energon, but the materials to make repairs and perform basic upkeep.

The cadets were still young enough to find adventure in exploring a haunted house.

Dragonfly joined them. ::I can't see anything from up top, Shaker. I never thought about all this metal interfering with our scans.::

::Yeah, we're Earthborn and this ain't ever gonna be home for us like it is for the older bots. I got about a hundred meters, anyone doing better?::

The two seekers had the furthest range, about five hundred meters tops with the metal walls and relatively narrow corridors confusing their perception of the surrounding electrical fields. Shaker put Dragonfly up front with Star, and Skyrocket in the back with Firecracker. Since they were on foot now, John moved up to the middle of the column.

Shaker shined his light through an open doorway. The room had long ago been stripped of anything useful, but it looked as though it had once been a workshop. What it produced remained a mystery.

Star asked, ::Want me to scout ahead and try to draw the ferals out?::

Shaker said, ::Not yet, stay with the group till I got a better idea of the layout of this place. One wrong turn and we could be split up till the Pit freezes over. If we don't spot any of them while we're clearin' the place, then we can get fancy.::

::Yes, team leader,:: she replied, and they moved out.

There was no sign of anything sparked on that level. Here and there a drone was performing maintenance, but that was the only movement.

John asked, ::Hey, Shaker, how do they keep track of the drones?::

::I don't know but I'm gonna find out. Hold up a klick.:: He radioed Crystallia and asked her. She didn't know either, but she quickly found out from her Syluran city counterpart. There was a network of closed-circuit cameras, as well as a feed from the drones themselves; it covered most of the area they were searching.

She got permission for Shaker's team to tap into it. He assigned that to Dragonfly, since seekers were wired to process a lot of visual information on the fly, and she wasn't using that capability down here in these tunnels.

Dragonfly downloaded the feed. ::Wait, Shaker, I think I see one. He's...below us...in some kind of maintenance chase between two rows of rooms, at least I think that's what it is.::

::How do we get there?:: He asked her.

::If that map they gave us is still good, right up here should be a ramp that goes down several levels. Then there's a causeway across something, and then there's another ramp down.::

::What exactly did you see?::

She projected a hologram for all of them to see. The camera's view back in a narrow hallway full of pipes and cables showed a bot that had once been blue and white, but now was mostly scratches and scuffs, crouching on all fours.

::He's not very big,:: Firecracker commented. ::He doesn't even look armed.::

::Praxian civilian,:: Earthshaker commented. ::I'll bet he's a fast little slagger, though, if his joints ain't froze up from lack of maintenance. Dragonfly, can he get out the other end of that?::

::It doesn't look like it, according to the map it ends there at a bulkhead, and beyond that there's a big room of some kind. But he could have dug a hole into there by now. A lot of Praxians have claws.::

Star shared a handful of paralysis rounds with Coriell. ::You have to aim for the helm, sir, but try to hit the thickest part several centimeters behind the audial so you have less chance of doing serious harm. The round itself is designed not to penetrate, but it could put out an optic really easily.::

Coriell pocketed the rounds and they continued, following Dragonfly's directions.

The deeper they went, the worse the maintenance problems were. The deepest, oldest levels had been abandoned first. Probably they had already become a nuisance to keep up, and furthest from the life-giving energy of their sun. Nobody wanted to tramp up four or five levels to put out an energon cube in the sunlight so that it could fill itself with fuel for them, and then climb back up there again to get it. Or have to sit up there and watch it to keep somebot from walking off with it, if there didn't happen to be extras.

They stopped and stared when they came to the causeway, a bridge over a wide gap between two sections. It was filled with pipes and conduits of all sorts going in all directions. Far below they could see flickering light from the generators that provided power to the planet. Overhead was a ceiling of metal panels, several of which had fallen into the causeway where they hung up on the pipes and leaned at crazy angles.

Shaker said, ::We better string some cable. I don't like the looks of that causeway.::

Anna said, ::Belay me, and I'll take a guide across.::

Shaker took two reels of cable from his subspace. One was thin, the other heavy enough to support a bot. Anna would take the thin one across, use it to bring a winch over, then use the winch to pull the heavy cable across.

She was about half way across, admiring the view into the depths of the dead part of the city, when the structure staggered her a bit with a tremble. The tremble turned into a shudder, and cracks began to chase themselves in front of her. She had broken into a run when Star screeched that it was crumbling behind her, which gave her feet wings: twice she leapt from falling sections of roadway and landed on the next without slowing down; a third leap left her hanging from the edge of the other side.

She swung herself up onto the wide ledge and stood looking down into a lot of places to hole her suit. Granted there was less gravity, but...

She swallowed hard, then looked across the Great Divide at the rest of her cohort. "Well, that was exciting," she said, and began to look for a place to attach a pulley, and hauled the heavier line across.

Corriell said, touching her helm to John's, "She always like that?"

"Ever since I've known her, sir. Thirteen or fourteen years now."

"Lord a'mighty," Coriell said, and moved away.

The hard part was finding a good place on the other side to attach the stronger cable securely enough to hold Earthshaker. On Earth he weighed about 12 tons, and he wasn't at his full size yet; the light gravity here brought him down to "only" a little less than four tons.

John and Coriell easily crossed the cable.

::Pull on it as hard as you can to be sure that will hold. I don't know how far I trust this wall,:: Lennox warned.

Dragonfly suggested, ::What if Rocket and I fly on either side of everyone as they cross, and take as much of their weight as we can off the cable? We can just kind of tow you across.::

::That oughta work. Star, you go first, then Firecracker. When you get across, you can help brace the cable.::

The crossing was much less exciting than Anna's mad rush across a collapsing bridge, but it took a while. When they were all over, Dragonfly checked the video feed from the chase again.

::Slag! He's gone.::

Star said calmly, ::It's OK. He couldn't have gone far. If he's not on camera now, he will be sooner or later.::

::Project the map of that level,:: Shaker said, in that slightly distracted tone he got when he was farming things out to his secondary processors and juggling the results.

Dragonfly did so and everyone crowded around.

::Wait a minute. He didn't get out cause he woulda had to come through here. The only other way he coulda gone is over here, this area back in here on the lowest level. What's in there?::

::I don't know, it's blacked out on all the maps I got. It was a secure area at one time.::

Star said, ::Civilian bots had low-level protocols against going into areas like that, or even querying about them. It was a caste thing. There were places that were effectively invisible to everyone except the warrior and leader castes. Mom told me about it. That was how the war could get started. The caste system was so unfair and repressive to the lower castes that eventually they were willing to follow anyone who seemed to show them a way out. Even Megatron.::

John said thoughtfully, ::But the virus would have overridden those protocols. So the ferals can get in, but nobody else thinks to look in there. And everyone who could have told them either died fighting or got captured.::

::Do we have to just leave 'em like that?:: Shaker asked.

Coriell spoke up, ::We pass it up the chain of command. What to do about it and how is way over our pay grade. Sometimes what seems like an obvious fix can just make a situation worse, as long as nobody's gonna die if you don't charge in and do something.::

::Yes, sir. But now we know where to look for that Praxian.::

Back on objective, they figured out the best way to get there. Dragonfly set a subconscious program to continually scan the video feed and alert her to any movement.

The lowest level had been heavily used as a recycling many places, only a narrow walkway of floor tiles remained. The rest was reduced to bare girders and a long drop to the power plant.

The seekers pointed downward. Two of the bots they were trying to rescue had fallen to their deaths at some point, possibly years ago. One was very small.

Star said, ::I hope that was a minibot, but I'm afraid it was a sparkling.::

Dragonfly said, ::We can get them.::

Shaker said, ::No, let's worry about the live ones first before we recover the bodies.::

That took them back to the work they'd done in Washington DC after the battle. They made sure they couldn't see any more than the two of them, and Star used her dagger to scratch the location of the corpses on a huge support beam. Coriell reported what they'd found, then they kept moving.

At the edge of the secure area, there was a glyph on the wall, which Crystallia confirmed that was a command glyph. Anyone not of a caste permitted to enter would remember this as a dead-end corridor.

They all saw a set of doors, jammed open.

Coriell said, ::Wait a minute. Let me see that map again, Dragonfly.::

The seeker projected it again.

::We need to get all the other exits covered before we go in there,:: the lieutenant said. ::And if this is a secure area, no matter what this map implies, there have to be more ways in and out of here.::

She got on the line to CIC, the ship's control center. A few minutes later, they were ordered to hold position while other units investigated possible additional exits from the area. There would be no sense in going in there and finding a lot of speedy little bots only to scare them into scattering. Once they had the area blocked off, the secure area could be searched.

They were all thankful they wouldn't have to go back across that cable.

The rooms they were passing were obviously offices. Offices had desks and chairs and places to keep datapads. One room was a hardline station, a place for bots to attach to a mainframe. Coriell asked, ::What's this room for?::

Star explained, ::You'd have a bunch of desks with computer workstations on them. It could be a library or anything. I wouldn't recommend hardlining to it to find out. It could be full of old viruses. There was some really nasty stuff in circulation back then, even worse than this feral virus. It would be better to let an experienced scout look at it first.::

::Roger that.::

Dragonfly said, ::There's a bot ahead!::

Carefully they headed up that way. The bot was a small Praxian, not the one they had been after originally: a red femme whose alt form was some sort of three-wheeled vehicle apparently designed to carry a large number of data pads from one place to another. When she saw them, she did a 180 on the spot and shot off up the hall, with the cadets in pursuit. Dragonfly got close enough to get her with a paralysis round.

Shaker turned her over so they could find her wrist and put an energon damper on her before the paralysis could wear off.

Coriell reported, ::We've got one, a red femme with a little three wheeled alt.::

::What do we do with her, LT?::

::Wait until she can walk. She might be small for a full-grown bot, but I'm not giving myself a hernia dragging her around.::

When the paralysis wore off, she immediately started screeching and jabbering at them in incoherent Cybertronian, sometimes pausing to hiss and snap at them. The humans scattered away from her sharp claws. She was only about seven feet tall and lightly armored; they wondered if she was full grown. As long as she'd been down here, she couldn't possibly still be a youngling. But then Dragonfly figured out what happened.

::She never got the chance to get a healer to help her upgrade,:: she said. ::She's stuck in her youngling form now for good unless she reformats.::

Shaker picked her up by a roll bar behind her neck. ::Knock it off!::

The next thing he knew, she'd grabbed his wrist, opened his panel with a claw and plugged in a hardline.

::Hey! Stop that!:: he yelled, both embarrassed and scared as unfamiliar code started flowing down the hardline, trying to worm its way through his defenses.

The room started to go fuzzy, and Shaker had trouble remembering what they were doing here and why all these people were crowded around him. Then he felt hot and cold at the same time as the anti-virus program kicked in, stripping out the foreign code.

Dragonfly gently disengaged the crazed bot's hardline. Shaker put some distance between them, and they all kept a safe distance from her while they figured out what to do about her. The ring of weapons around her kept her from fleeing.

John, obviously immune to the virus, finally pulled a big roll of duct tape out of a pocket, pinned her arm, and taped her wrist panel shut. For good measure, he taped her claws together as well. All his healer's instincts went against causing the pitiful whining and chittering cries she was making, but he had to tell himself it was for everyone's own good until they got her back to civilization where she could be cured.

She continued to hiss, trying to kick and _bite _him.

Coriell reached up and smacked her hard on the back of the helm. It didn't hurt her, but it scared her into settling down. After that she hunched over, as if she were trying to curl up into as small a ball as possible, and let John and Anna tape her up.

She followed along quietly enough. A couple of times when it seemed she had the opportunity, she tried to dart off, to find that she could move only at a walk. She didn't seem able to comprehend what the energon damper was, or why it slowed her so greatly.

They cleared that level, and found no more ferals hiding in the offices. The last doorway at the end of the hall opened onto a ramp leading up to the next level.

The little red bot curled up in the corner, making scared little chirping noises. Star said, ::It's OK. We're not going to hurt you. You're going to be OK.::

She tried to scoot back down the ramp.

Firecracker said, ::She's not gonna make any sense as long as she's got that virus.::

::Yeah, but she doesn't want to go up here. I'll bet there's bigger ones up here and she's scared of them,:: Shaker said.

::Makes sense.::

Shaker spoke up. ::LT, I dunno if you're gonna like it, but we know the antivirus works. Let me go up ahead and lure them out one at a time.::

::Bigger ones might smack you around a little first,:: she pointed out.

::Might try, if I was gonna stand still long enough,:: he replied.

John asked, ::Where are they getting energon from?::

Coriell said, ::Their families leave it out for them. They won't come near it if anyone's close by, but if it's clear they come and get it.::

Shaker went up first, leaving Firecracker to herd their rescuee/prisoner along.

The first one that Dragonfly had spotted on the surveillance dived out of a doorway and pounced on Shaker, sending both of them sprawling. Shaker kicked him off and stopped himself from drawing a weapon. He took off toward the others. By the time the feral realized there were more than one of them, Coriell had already paralyzed him. Another round of duct tape later, they had another feral safely under control.

Fortunately, they met another team, who were able to take the two they'd caught up to some city enforcers, who were waiting to see them safely to the hospital.

Catching the rest of them was more of the same, and an all day job. The saddest part was recovering the two bodies; the smaller one was indeed just a sparkling.

Dragonfly brought the little body up, and wouldn't let anyone else help with him until she turned him over to his parents. Skyrocket comforted her, ::At least they know what happened to him, at least he's home now.::

But while two families grieved, nine others were reunited. It hadn't taken the healers long to remove the virus from the recovered ferals. They were shocked that they had lost so much time, and they needed a lot of delayed maintenance and upgrades, but they were going to be fine now, members of their families again.

And citizens of Sylura once more.

The _Abundance _was on her way with a cargo of supplies, mostly medical, but she was also tasked with beginning the long-awaited repairs on their city.

One of the engineers from Mars Port would be staying for a while to do a more in-depth survey than any of these mecha had the skills for. Some of the Sylurans who needed more advanced medical care would be going back to Earth temporarily, but the colony would remain. These people didn't want to abandon their home, and with the war over they didn't have to. Given time and help to rebuild, they would flourish again.

Star watched the little red bot walking down the street with her cohort. ::I wonder what will happen to her?::

Anna said, ::I don't know. How will being stuck as a youngling affect her?::

::She can't carry a sparkling, for one thing. We don't develop that ability until we get our adult frames. And she'll never have a real adult alt. There are some upgrades that can be made to make sure other bots recognize her as an adult, so she can live a more normal life. Crystallia said it happened to some of the miners and they're doing all right.::

::If miners are online at all, they're doing all right, to hear them tell it,:: Anna replied.

::True! Us, though, we've got to get back.::

Anna climbed into Star's cab. Their job in the colony was done, the whole colony returned to the family of Cybertronians flung across the galaxy, the feral victims of Soundwave's manipulations returned to their families. Their next assignment was surveying a jump point, which sounded like it would be pretty quiet and boring, but important. Anna thought she could appreciate quiet and boring, actually. It would make a nice contrast.

End Chapter 2


	3. Jump Point

(Chapter 3 - Jump Point)

(Disclaimers in Chapter 1)

The _EDS Chicago _stood about a kilometer off the hulking charcoal-gray wreck which had once been the next jump point in the chain between Cybertron and the sector where Earth was found. A kilometer was a negligible distance in space.

The Command Information Center was busy, as the Wolf Pack streamed information back to the ship.

The big screen showed the damage that had taken the jump point off the grid. An explosion had blown a ten-meter-wide hole at the spherical station's midpoint. Since the armor plating was bent outward, the explosion had occurred inside.

The Sylurans told Colonel Brewster that there had been no distress call from the station, and that two different ships had been sent to determine the jump point's fate. The third had brought back images of the damage and scans showing no online bots aboard, but returned to Sylura without finding out what had happened to the two previous expeditions.

Brewster ordered them to send in a UAV. The little drone easily got in through the hole in the station's hull, and returned video of the interior of the spherical station.

The deck where the jump point's attendants had lived and worked followed the curvature of the hull. The jump point generator had been located in the center of the orb. Exploding, it had left the station a mess of floating wreckage and debris.

Crystallia said, "Can't tell what happened exactly, but it's definitely scrapped. Might be able to recycle some of it, but it'll have to be totally rebuilt. That doesn't look like battle damage. It all came from the inside."

"Sabotage?" Brewster asked.

"That's all that makes sense to me, Boss. Nova Prime designed the first jump points over a million years ago, and they operated safely for most of that time. There were run-of-the-mill accidents and malfunctions, of course, but they didn't just blow all to the Pit like that without some kind of help."

"Doesn't explain what happened to the first two ships that came out here to see what happened."

"Maybe the saboteur got them too," the engineer speculated. "Some of this damage doesn't seem to make sense, though. There are only a few pieces of the jump point generator housing floating around. For one thing, if it blew it to scrap, where's the rest of it? And how come it only blew that one hole in the hull instead of blowing the whole station to smithereens? And what happened to the crew? There should have been half a dozen bots here, and I don't see as much as a digit plate!"

"What do you think did it?"

"No idea, sir. Whatever it was, it's long gone now. I can't tell you any more from here."

The CAG's voice came over the radio, "Wolf Pack Actual, _Chicago_. All scans are negative. No energy signatures."

"_Chicago_ Actual, Wolf Pack Actual. Hold position."

"Roger that."

Brewster turned to Crystallia. "Take a team over there to check it out, see if you can figure out what happened here. Get Coriell and her baby birds. Guarding a science team will be good experience for them."

"Yes, Captain."

Coriell gathered her cadets, except for the two seekers, at the entrance to the docking bay. The organics sealed their suits then went through to meet Crystallia's team at the shuttle.

Crystallia was the senior officer, so she conducted the short briefing. Once she was finished, Coriell explained to the cadets, "We'll go aboard the station first and check it out. Scans show nothing dangerous, but we'll make sure of that before the techs follow us. Remember that there is floating debris and some of it is likely to be sharp. Puncture resistant does not mean puncture proof. Lennox, review holed-suit procedures."

Anna stood. "Sir, yes sir! Take out a suit patch and remove the protective wrap. Slap it over the hole and adhere it firmly with as much pressure as possible. Hold for at least thirty seconds. Return to a pressurized area at the first opportunity."

Coriell said, "Very good. I actually holed my suit once when we were building the engines to move Mjolnir into orbit. There are internal barriers that will inflate to prevent your whole suit from depressurizing. Feels like the blood pressure cuff from hell. The patches really work, though. The most important thing is, don't panic. You want to get the hole fixed as quick as you can to keep from getting frostbite at the site of the tear. I ended up with a burn about as big as the end of a beer can. And another thing—whatever that glue is on those patches, once it grabs something, it ain't lettin' go. This is why you don't go off on your own. If something happens where you can't reach it, or if you panic, having a buddy right there can save you a whole lot of grief." When she was sure they had all been paying attention, she went on. "When we are five minutes out you will don jet packs. Clear?"

"Sir yes sir!"

When they reached the jump point, the shuttle opened its cargo doors and the team kicked off. Crystallia and her team were covering them from near the shuttle.

Anna powered up her jet pack and followed Coriell's lead. They'd had jetpack orientation in the docking bay, which had been depressurized for the exercise. It was entirely different without the safety of the ship's hull around her.

If something did go wrong, then Dragonfly or Skyrocket would come after her. She wasn't going to get lost out here.

Even so, it was the scariest thrill ride she'd ever been on in her life—and just as much fun, as soon as she was sure she had the hang of the jet pack.

None of their bots had the mods to maneuver in space without transforming to comet form, and that wasn't practical for so short a distance. They each had a Cybertronian jet pack, and had downloaded the software to control it by means of a hardline. They hadn't been allowed to practice in the docking bay, it was too small—but they weren't dependent on an air cylinder and suit integrity to survive out here, either. Once their human teammates were clear, they came off the ramp one at a time. Anna kept track of them—Shaker, Star, Firecracker.

The jump point was a dark globe about one hundred meters in diameter. Here and there, antennae and defensive weaponry projected. She knew from the briefing that there was a docking hatch on the other side, but they were going to gain entrance through a large hole in the hull. Large triangular sections had burst open and curled back away from the hole like sections of orange peel. Anna had no idea what kind of force had done that.

She hoped whatever was responsible wasn't in there now. The Wolves hadn't detected anything, but she knew enough about scouts to know it was possible there could be a whole damn ops team in there, and her cohort wouldn't know it till they uncloaked.

Shaker readied his autocannon and went in first, with Star and Coriell right behind him. The lieutenant shined a light around the inside of the station. Everything still attached to the inside of the hull had been pounded to rubble by floating debris, and that rubble still floated around. After eight hundred years, repeated collisions had used up most of the original energy, and that was the only reason they could safely enter at all. But all it took to break the pool balls, so to speak, was for two pieces to collide, sending one into the path of others, starting yet another chain reaction of collisions. If someone hadn't come to investigate, in this airless environment that could have gone on until all the broken bits finally found their way out of the hole in the hull.

She was glad that she had reviewed holed-suit procedures. This was exactly where something like that could happen, if anyone got stupid or unlucky.

The rest of the team gingerly floated through the tear in the hull, avoiding the jagged edges that jutted out into space. Once past that hazard, they made a systematic search of the place, lights and weapons pointed into every shadow or crevice to make sure there was nothing hiding in them.

There was no indication what had happened to the station's crew or the two missing ships, but there was also no sign of anything dangerous aside from the floating debris. Coriell radioed to the engineer, ::It's clear, Crys. Bring them on over, but watch out, there's still crap floating around.::

Crystallia led her team across. She made zero-g operations look like a stroll down the sidewalk; in her ore-carrier form, very precise vernier burns to brake or change vector were second nature to her. She and her assistant, another miner named Tripper, started capturing the floating debris and stowing the trophies in their ore holds to get it out of the way, while the three human members of her team spread out, recording and measuring and taking readings.

Tripper was examining the hull breach. ::Chief Engineer, this looks consistent with a blown generator housing. A jet of energy would've holed the side of the station like this. Could the crew have abandoned ship before it blew?::

::Makes as much sense as anything else, but if they did, why didn't they go to Sylura for help?::

Firecracker said, ::LT, there's something funny about that explosion. That isn't where the containment should have breached, if it was going to.::

::What do you mean?::

He projected an image of the generator where it had been when it had been operating. ::The weak points would be anywhere a component penetrated the generator housing. Those were reinforced, but still, if it was going to lose containment, that's where it would give.:: He created a holographic line from the center of the hull breach to the generator. It hit a solid-looking area of the generator housing. ::I think something _made _that hole in the generator housing, sir.::

Crystallia nodded. ::You got the beginnings of a civil engineer here, LT. He's right. If it was going to breach on its own, it would have been at one of the power coupling attachment points. That's happened a few times. But this isn't what you see afterward. You got a station _and_ a generator with holes in 'em. Where'd you learn this stuff, mech, you gonna go demolitions?::

::No, Chief Engineer, not as a primary though I wouldn't mind getting my certification. My father is Ironhide.::

::Oh, yeah, that explains it.::

Firecracker asked, ::What could've happened to that generator housing?::

The engineer hummed thoughtfully over the radio link. ::We don't have but maybe ten, fifteen percent of the generator housing here. The rest of it's gone. This junk is mostly the crew's furnishings. Berths, hardline consoles, work benches, that kinda thing. Once I get this stuff back to the _Shytown_ and do some tests on it, I'll be able to tell you more. Tripper, do a photo survey of the docking area. That's the only area of the outer hull that has covered areas the seekers couldn't have photographed yet.::

::Yes, Chief Engineer.::

Coriell sent Anna and Star to cover Tripper while he worked. He maneuvered over to a hatch almost opposite the hole in the hull, and attached to a port on the hatch frame to manually crank it open. Outside was a landing; half of it was a sealed room that served as an airlock as well as a place to stack freight being delivered to the station. It held a few nondescript containers, which Tripper subspaced.

Star asked, ::Would a station like this normally be kept pressurized, Trip?::

::Yeah, not as much as on a planet, but generally enough to act as a heat sink. Atmosphere is only a convenience for us. I keep forgetting you younglings were sparked on Earth. Sylura was the first Cybertronian place you've ever seen, wasn't it?::

::That's right.::

Then Star moved an empty box and found a bot's head, the dead gray optics staring right at her.

She jumped straight up. Anna and Tripper spun, drawing their weapons, and had the disembodied helm covered from two different directions by the time she impacted the ceiling.

::Look out, Star, it's gonna getcha," Tripper grinned as he subspaced his gun.

Anna snickered, "Looks pretty dangerous to me."

Embarrassed, she said, ::Let's see _you_ do any different next time you find somebot's head lying around without the rest of him!::

Coriell asked, ::What the hell's going on out there?::

::We located remains, sir!:: Anna replied.

::That's somebody's relative, Cadet! Bag it and treat it with a little respect!::

::Sir, yes sir!::

They wrapped the head in heavy-duty plastic and sealed it, then carefully stowed it in the shuttle.

The rest of the survey was soon completed. Back on the _Chicago_, the head got taken to Medical, while Crystallia and Tripper took the other material to Engineering.

CMO Vance examined the head. "Sorry, there's nothing I can do for this poor bastard."

Coriell was used to Vance's sense of humor. "We need to know how he got that way. Uh, it is a he?"

"Hard to tell with just the head, because they're all different, but probably. Femmes usually choose more delicate forms than that." Vance took a penlight from her pocket and examined the head through the plastic. "These severed edges are uneven. He didn't get his head cut off in one slice."

"Damage from the explosion?"

"Maybe, but where's the rest of him? Don't think it walked off without a processor."

"Yeah, a lot of things over there aren't adding up," Coriell scowled.

"Well, that means the Boss is going to be breathing down my neck for some answers before long. I'd better get to work."

"Sir." Coriell left with one last look at the disembodied head lying on the exam berth.

Vance turned to the berth. "Well, my friend, let's see if we can't find out what happened to you—at least give you your designation back." She turned to a locker to get out a cart of equipment and commed her assistant.

Everyone had to witness their first autopsy sometime. She began to cut away the plastic while she waited for Whitefire.

The femme arrived a few minutes later, and put away a box of paper exam gowns. "What did you need, Healer?"

"They found a DB on the station. Well, part of one."

"Primus! Where's the rest of him?"

"That's what everyone else wants to know and we need to find out. Start with a series of scans, and concentrate on the severed edges. What do you think did that?"

"I—don't know. I'm not a CSI but it looks like—no, that can't be right. Let me project the scan on the screen." She wirelessly controlled one of the monitors and put up a magnification of the cut edge of one of the small articulated armor plates that had made up the mech's neck. "I can't imagine what would make a mark like that."

"Something serrated."

"We should see if we can recover his video memory, right?"

Vance said, "You tell me. Is there anything else we should do first?"

"Try to get his identification string," she said.

Vance nodded approval. "Nobody deserves to be a John Doe, or whatever that is in Cybertronian. The last thing we can do for this guy, whatever happened to him, is give his family some closure, if they're still out there somewhere."

"He looks like he could have been a Praxian, as most of the people in the colony are. If he is, it would be strange if he didn't have _some_ clan there to say the prayers over him," the apprentice replied.

"Get the hacker's deck and see what you can find out. I'm going to see what information we have on the station's crew and the crews of those missing ships."

"Yes, Healer."

As they turned to go about their work, neither noticed a small form crawl out of the severed head and drop to the floor. It quickly scuttled under the equipment cart, where it remained.

Whitefire returned with the hacker's deck. She pushed the cart out of her way and put the deck on the exam table.

She thought she saw movement over by the cart, but further examination showed nothing there. Just a shadow, she decided, and hardlined the deck to the first undamaged port she could find.

She looked up as Vance came back with Cadet Parker. He asked, "Is there anything?"

"There's still residual data. It may not be readable. We'll know in a minute," his fellow apprentice replied.

Vance saw something in the space between two armor plates behind the left audial. "Forceps."

John reflexively turned to the cart to get the requested tool and slapped it into her gloved palm just as his mother had taught him. One reason blood and guts didn't bother him was that she had trained him early on to identify every surgical tool in the repertoire, and the proper way to hand it to a surgeon whose bloody gloves might be slippery. His skill, acquired very young, had freed up the hands of a qualified nurse to do something else. The experience had been so fascinating and awe-inspiring that he had known right then the only thing he ever wanted to be was a doctor.

He moved the cart into a more convenient spot to hand her equipment and still see what was going on, then saw movement, and squatted to check it out.

He was sure he saw something moving and looked around the cart.

"What's the matter?"

"Something moved."

Whitefire said, "Yes, I thought I saw something a minute ago too, but there isn't anything. I think it's just the vent blowing that plastic wrapper on the box of gloves around."

John shrugged, then turned his attention to the much more fascinating work on the table. Vance pulled something out of the armor crevice. "It's a piece of a circuit board," Whitefire said.

"Not one of his," John said. "That came from some kind of non-sentient."

Vance nodded. "Junk from something in the station, most likely. But that would indicate that our friend here survived the explosion. He must have taken cover out on the loading dock because there wasn't a lot of debris floating around out there."

"So whatever happened to him, it happened out on the dock," John replied thoughtfully. "Healer, I was out there and it didn't look like there had been a fight. I mean, some things were knocked over and so forth, but you'd think if someone got his head cut off there would have been more of a scuffle."

"Unless he had his back turned and they caught him by surprise," Whitefire said.

"What 'they?'" Vance asked her. "We don't have anyone else in evidence yet."

"There are easier ways to commit suicide than by cutting your own head off. And even if he did that, the rest of his body would still be there. I believe that does put someone else in evidence," John said.

Whitefire said, "No matter who did it, there definitely should have been a lot of energon around, as well. I know it sublimates in vacuum, but there still should have been a detectable residue on surfaces."

"Let's see what else the evidence tells us. Those tool marks at the incision have me curious. I've seen plenty of weapon marks on Cybertronian armor, and this isn't from that."

Whitefire said, "Wait, I'm getting something." She turned to the hacker's deck. "Healer, I have his identification string. He's Torque of Sylura, Engineer's Assistant at the jump point."

They were all quiet a moment. It was strange how the knowledge of a name changed the status of the remains on the table from specimen to cadaver, from thing to person.

They were all too focused to note a tiny form that darted from the cart to the shadow of the exam table, and from there to Whitefire's ped. It climbed quickly and wriggled under her shin plate.

Vance asked, "Are any of his recent memories still intact?"

"I'm not sure yet. It isn't finished downloading and backing up the data."

Vance removed the small, cut armor plate that she and Whitefire had been discussing earlier, and took it to the microscope to use greater magnification than her apprentice could achieve.

Something about those marks bothered her.

Crystallia quickly established that the furniture and other items from the station had been destroyed as a result of continued impact with the floating debris. The generator housing itself, though...that was weird.

Tripper said, "I don't get it, Craftmaster. What's different about an engine housing?"

"The right question would be, what's different about _this_ engine housing. For that you need to know a little more about jump points. When I was an apprentice this was considered a craft secret. You know that Nova Prime designed the jump point network."

"Yes, Mistress."

"What you don't know is that they're drones."

"But why would that be a craft secret?"

"The only difference between a bot and a drone is that a bot has a spark. A drone is a frame without what makes us alive. Now what if somebot came along and reformatted into a jump point frame? He'd control the jump point. Nobot would be going anywhere unless he let them."

"Why didn't people do that? You'd think during the war, either side would have wanted the advantage."

"Because they didn't know about it. It was forbidden knowledge to everyone except the subset of the engineer caste whose ancestral responsibility was to care for the jump points. My mother was sparked into that caste, but she found her sparkmate among the miners and chose to live casteless for him. By the time they had me sparked, she was minerclan in everything but frame anyway. After the war got bad, she taught me everything she knew so the knowledge wouldn't be lost. Now, there is no forbidden knowledge for that same reason. There aren't enough of us left to safeguard forbidden knowledge for the next generation."

"So this engine housing is different because it's living metal."

"That's right, Tripper. But that still doesn't explain what happened to it. I want a standard battery of scans on this wreckage. If we can find a piece from the breach, maybe we can tell from that why it blew. Get that baby bird, Firecracker, down here to help if he isn't doing anything they can't spare him from. Doesn't hurt someone who's interested in explosives to know this stuff."

"Yes, Craftmaster."

An hour later, Whitefire had recovered all the memory data that she could. Most was gone. What remained was a short scene of chaos, video only. The jump point's bots were all running around the deck, chasing something with large tools and other improvised clubs. Several reboots of the memory failed to show them what the doomed bots pursued. Then one of them fell to the deck, screaming and tearing at her armor. The clip dissolved into static.

Vance scowled. "What the fuck—?"

Whitefire idly scratched at her leg with the opposite ped. "I don't know. They were chasing—Ow!"

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing, I think I got a wire kinked."

"Start removing his helm plates. I'm going to see if Crys is getting anywhere."

Whitefire and John got to work while she made her call.

Crystallia was staring at the edge of a piece of the engine housing from the jump point, which was curled back on itself, turned inside out.

This particular piece of the jigsaw puzzle had come from the edge of the breach. If there was a key to discovering what had happened to the station, she was holding it in her servo.

She took a detailed scan of it and zoomed in on the edge. She was just beginning to investigate the odd scoring she found there when her internal comm alerted her to an incoming call from Vance's commlink.

She set a subconscious routine to compare the pattern against her library of tool mark images and alert her to any possible matches, then answered the call. ::Good joor, Stephanie.::

"Crys, are you having any luck with the stuff they brought you? We've got some weird tool marks on a piece of this guy's neck plating. I was wondering if you'd ever seen anything like it before."

::Let me see,:: the engineer replied.

Vance sent her copies of the microscopic images.

Crystallia replied, ::I'm still trying to identify it, but those marks are consistent with those I found on a piece of wreckage. Whatever this was, it breached the engine housing.::

Vance said, "They look like _bite _marks."

At that moment, Vance's commlink picked up a shrill terrified screech that had to be Vance's apprentice, and a loud male human curse. Then Vance was yelling, "Lock down Medbay-4, authorization: Charlie Mike Oscar Seven Seven Niner!"

::Vance! What's wrong? Stephanie!::

Vance had left the commlink lying on the lab bench when she heard Whitefire scream. Her apprentice had her shin plate open and was trying to fish something out of the inner workings. Parker clobbered a fist-sized target with a crowbar.

Vance caught one of them under a specimen jar. She'd never seen anything like it before, round body, four metal legs. Then it opened its mouth, for all the world like a little blue Pac-Man, to reveal two rows of sharp triangular teeth. The CMO shouted the lockdown code, sealing the lab.

"What the hell are these things?" John asked, as he dispatched another one.

Whitefire finally caught and killed the one that had been chewing on her leg. "Scraplets," she replied, as if that explained everything.

Vance ordered, "Hold your leg still so I can have a look. Tell me what a scraplet is."

"They're drones. They're a weapon of terror. They hide until they get the chance to sneak up on a bot, then they start feeding. When they eat about half again their mass, they divide in two. They're stupid but—if they've infested the ship—"

Vance asked, "Can you tell if you have any more of them on you right now?"

"No," she almost whimpered, but went on reporting anyway. "But there are. They avoid sensitive areas until there are so many the little ones get crowded onto them. By the time the first bot realizes they're infected, everybot usually is. But I was in here the whole time, and I would have attracted them, so maybe we contained the infestation."

Vance told her, "Get in the scan booth and stay there till we kill all the ones that are loose in here right now. Then if you have any more, we'll get rid of them." She picked up a large hammer and joined the cadet in searching the bay. "What happened?"

"When we opened up his skull plates, they came jumping out." John shuddered.

"Check the video, see if you can tell how many there were," Vance told him. She checked under the cart, then started opening floor-level storage lockers and peering into equipment bays to see if any had hidden there while they were getting tools out.

A thorough search cleared the bay, but created a bigger concern. Unless there was a reason to seal off a bay, air circulated through the ship to the algae tanks, which recycled the oxygen.

Ordinarily these vents had gratings over them; now, though, one grating had a large piece broken out. Any time before Vance sealed off the lab, which had dropped a metal plate that blocked the vent, scraplets could have got into the ventilation system.

Vance got her commlink. "Vance to Bridge."

"Bridge."

"We have an emergency down here. May I speak to the captain, please?"

A moment later, he came on the line. "Brewster."

"Sir, it's Vance. The remains we brought over from the jump point were infested with scraplets. Apprentice Whitefire has been infected. I sealed off the medbay, but sir, the ventilator cover was damaged. They could be in the air ducts."

Brewster apparently knew what scraplets were, from his curse. "Report back to me on the apprentice' condition after you're sure you have the situation in medbay under control."

"Yes, sir."

The klaxons started sounding all over the ship, the same sound radioed out on the bots' general frequency. "All hands, this is the Captain speaking. The _Chicago_ is under foothold condition red. There are scraplets aboard the ship. All crewmecha are to perform an immediate self-inspection. Do not report to medbay at this time, repeat, do not report to medbay at this time. If you discover bite injuries, call for assistance and remain in place, help will come to you. Human crew will begin a complete search of the ship. Report to the bridge as each section is cleared. That is all."

On the hangar deck, Dragonfly let out a little screech at the word "scraplet." The other Wolf Pack pilots either laughed at that, or shushed her—until they saw the look on the two cadets' faceplates, and heard the Captain's orders regarding bite wounds.

The CAG came to her assistance and he ordered one of the squadron's mechanics to give Skyrocket a hand. The rest improvised clubs from large tools and scattered out to hunt scraplets.

Back in medbay, Vance and John lowered a containment tank over the head on the table, then Vance called Crystallia. "What do you know about these things, Crys?"

::They scare me worse than about anything else.::

"Whitefire had one under her shin plate."

::Fraggin' Pit,:: the engineer replied. ::She's going to have to strip all her armor and you'll just have to look for them. They're really dangerous if they manage to infect somebody who's in recharge—or, somebody who doesn't know they're around.::

"What kills them?"

::Anything that kills anything else. Stomp 'em, throw them up against a bulkhead. One of them is a nuisance, but then there are two, then four, then eight...::

"What happens when they run out of food?"

::They eat each other until the last ones starve. Unless, like what happened here, the heat goes off and they freeze into stasis lock.::

"Till some damn fool warms them up and starts the whole thing all over again," Vance replied. "Crys, you were carrying that stuff in your subspace hold. Turn out your hold and go through everything in it."

::Right.::

Vance turned to Whitefire. "Lab's clear. Let's make sure you don't have any more passengers."

Whitefire lay on the deck so that the two humans could work. Ordinarily she would have turned off her pain sensors to have her armor removed, but she was too afraid to do that now: a scraplet might be chewing on her, and with her sensors off, she wouldn't be able to tell it was there.

John found a tiny one busily gnawing on her lower leg strut. He grabbed it and whacked its head on the deck—and then yelped when hot energon sprayed up his arm. "There's another one somewhere, that one must have just split a minute ago to be that small."

"I see it," Vance said before Whitefire could panic. "Try to hide from _me, _will you?" She grabbed for it, but it ducked further into the workings of Whitefire's knee.

Whitefire kicked her heel against the deck, causing the scraplet to fall. Then she bent her knee. There was a squeal and a loud _crunch. _Scraplet bits clinked to the deck under her leg.

After that, they gave her the most thorough exam she'd had since she'd gotten her youngling-to-adult upgrade. They found no more scraplets.

They helped her replace her armor and the three of them stood looking at each other for a moment. Then Vance said, "Whitefire, if you think you're going to glitch, sit down before you fall down."

"I'm not going to glitch," she said. "What do we do now?"

"I'll report the bay clear, and get our next assignment."

After making sure Star wasn't infected, she and Anna began searching the area where they had been working, which happened to be the cargo hold. Most everything in there was in sealed containers, and it would have been quite obvious if scraplets had gnawed into one of them. The opened containers were harder to search, but soon they had some help from the quartermaster and some of his people.

He told Star, "When you finish searching a container, put the lid back on it tight."

"Yes, sir!"

They were both inside a large container full of airplane parts when they heard shouts and laughter from the other end of the bay. They poked their heads out to see the humans gathered around an open wall panel.

Some enterprising soul had built a still back in there. An ingenious ventilation system captured the vapors to prevent _eau_ _de_ still from giving it away.

"What do you want us to do with it? Space it?" One guy asked.

The quartermaster grinned. "Yeah, sure you space it. Pack it up and take it to the storeroom behind the office, you can 'space' it from there!"

Two shifts later, the ship had been meticulously searched from stem to stern, and all the bots had cleared medical, which had finally been reopened for business after all the bays near the one where Vaughn had been conducting the autopsy were also declared scraplet-free. Once that happened, every bot on the ship had, understandably, wanted the CMO's reassurance that _they_ were scraplet-free.

John showered and put on a clean uniform, then suited up again to go down a level to their squad bay. They were all there ahead of him. "Is everyone all right?"

"All clear. Did the healer's apprentice really get infected?"

"She did, but she's fine now," he replied.

"I wouldn't be," Star said. "There's a horror movie in there somewhere."

"Two words," Anna said. "Coconut crabs."

They all laughed nervously. The bots often maligned their many-legged neighbors for pinching small armor plates to use for shells, while the humans were afraid of getting disabled in the jungle and eaten alive. No one actually knew of anyone either had happened to, but no one took a nap on the ground unless there was someone keeping watch, either.

John said, "I got it. An army of scraplets riding tame coconut crabs."

Anna quoted _Aliens_, "'Take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.'"

Everyone else chorused, "'It's the only way to be sure!'"

It was nearly lights out, so John and Anna tethered themselves to the bulkhead. Shaker checked that everyone else was on their berth, then he turned off the light and lay down for some much-needed recharge.

An hour later a piercing screech woke them all. There was mass confusion until someone turned on the lights, and then they could all see that Dragonfly was seemingly in convulsions. At first nobody knew what was wrong. Then Anna saw a scraplet crawling on her wing. Shaker grabbed and crushed it, while Star called for help.

John told her, "Dragonfly! We can't help you if you don't lie still!"

Trembling and crying, she did as she was told. "They're _in _my _wing."_

"I'll get 'em," John promised her. "Kill your pain sensors and unlock your armor. Somebody call it in, and get the CMO!"

Star said, "Already done. She's on her way."

Coriell got there first, and had to wait in the corridor until the CMO arrived to override the lock. They found Parker already up to his elbows in his friend's wing, and everyone else killing scraplets.

Coriell demagnitized a boot and kicked one into the bulkhead. It didn't move any more after that.

Vance flew across the ceiling, over the crowd of bots and humans, to land on Dragonfly's berth. The CMO remembered how panicked Whitefire had been, and she was twice Dragonfly's age. The seeker was scared to death, holding it together only because she had her cohort right there with her. Then there were Nightstar and Earthshaker, treating the damn fuckin' things like ants at a picnic to keep her calm, although they _had _to be just as scared. Vance had what was left of one bot in her medbay thanks to these things. She wasn't going to have any more if she could help it.

She wanted to leave Star and Shaker to reassure Dragonfly. That left Firecracker and the other seeker, Skyrocket. He was closest. "You know the drill, kid."

"Yes, sir." Skyrocket lay down and unlocked his armor.

Star calmly reached under a forearm plate, fished out a scraplet, and popped it like a balloon. "Sir, I'd say that answers the question how many of us have been infected," she commented to the Lieutenant.

"I want to know how the hell they got in here. You were all cleared once." Coriell pulled out a flashlight and began to search the bay, carefully looking in and around everything.

Vance called Whitefire and ordered, "Get yourself cleared again, then go check personally on every bot except the Baby Birds, I got them. There's another infestation down here in their squad bay."

::Yes, Healer!::

John said, "Doctor Vance, when you have the opportunity, I think you should take a look."

"Just a minute. Got 'em all?"

"Still need to make sure, sir," he replied.

"Acknowledged." Vance started catching scraplets and handing them out to Lennox to kill them. It was fairly methodical work, as the scraplets weren't smart enough to take cover when a neighbor got grabbed. They just kept eating like termites.

Firecracker called, "LT! I see how it got in! Look at the light fixture, one of them chewed a hole in the panel!"

"Fraggit. I thought they wouldn't eat ordinary metal, much less plastic like that panel." Vance scowled.

Coriell kicked off to examine the fixture up close. "Mice don't _eat_ walls or cardboard boxes either, but they'll gnaw a hole through if they smell food on the other side." She shined her light inside the hole, but she didn't see any more scraplets.

Of course not. They'd all got out in the bay to go after _her kids._

Later on, Coriell would remember this as the moment when she began to take it personally. Those things needed to die. Yesterday.

She slapped a suit patch over the hole. It wouldn't stop them, but they would be able to see if any more scraplets got in or out of the bay that way.

Every one of the cadet bots had been infected. There were enough scraplets that they started killing them inside a trash bag to try to contain the energon before droplets floating around the bay could become a hazard.

They were just finishing making sure that Star was free of them when there was a knock at the door. It was Colonel Brewster. Coriell came to attention and announced, "Captain on deck!"

Everyone else snapped to as well. Brewster ordered, "At ease. Cadet Team Leader, report."

"Sir! We were all in recharge or sleeping when we heard Cadet Dragonfly having problems. When we checked, we found out she was infected again. We locked down the bay and reported it. They must've chewed a hole through that light fixture right after we turned in for the shift. By the time we woke up, we all had 'em."

"Doctor Vance?"

"I don't want Dragonfly putting any stress on her wings till further notice. I can't replace the strut out here, I can only weld in new metal and let her self-repair systems integrate it. She's the only one who was seriously hurt."

Brewster said, "Good work, Cadets. You handled this emergency exactly the way you should have. Is this bay clear now?"

"Yes, sir," Coriell told him.

"OK, I think the best thing you can do right now is keep it that way. You bots stick together and watch each other's backs. If one of you has to go somewhere, you all go. Coriell, take Lennox with you and see what you can find in that Jeffries tube. Somewhere back in the mechanical areas has to be where the damn things have been hiding. Parker, you're with the Doc."

Vance took custody of the bag of dead scraplets. There had to be a more efficient way to kill these things, and she was going to find it.

Coriell and Lennox armed themselves with pipe wrenches and opened an access panel into the maintenance chase above the bots' quarters. Two crewmen stood guard there, one carrying a hammer and the other a piece of pipe. Aboard ship, where a missed shot could wreak havoc, projectile weapons were usually left in the weapons locker. A club or a plain old boot was the weapon of choice here.

Lennox tapped her wrench against the air duct. "LT, how will we know where they are inside the ductwork?"

"There are clean-outs every so often. You're smaller than I am. You might have to crawl in there and look. Not claustrophobic, are you?"

"No, sir." _And I wouldn't tell you if I were...sir._

Coriell led the way to the first clean-out. All along the way, they carefully checked every small opening that even looked like it _might _contain a scraplet. They had it brought home to them this morning that one of the damn things could infect a whole bay, and they were shocked at just _how_ fast the infestation had become a life-threatening danger.

Anna couldn't let herself think too much about how easily she could have lost her whole cohort except John, if Dragonfly hadn't awakened when she did. If there was a single scraplet in the area that they had been assigned to search, she meant to find and kill it.

They split up when they got to the air duct clean-out. Coriell stayed in the Jeffries tube and made sure the area that they had just cleared stayed cleared. Anna first crawled back to the squad bay, and nearly got grabbed out of there when Star heard something rustling around behind the vent cover. She climbed out into the bay to turn around, then Star replaced the vent cover behind her as she went back the other way.

About fifty meters past the first clean-out, Coriell found out how they had got into the Jeffries tube. There was a fist-sized hole gnawed through an access panel. This panel led to a large conduit carrying several hydraulic lines.

Those conduits ran all over the ship, carrying everything from energon to coolant to drinking water for the humans. She reported, "Bridge, this is Coriell. They've been getting around through the conduits!"

"Roger that. Stand by."

Presently two men arrived with a replacement panel and a couple of large hammers. Coriell and Lennox continued their inspection. A small drone was sent through the conduit to inspect it.

A few scraplets were found on some of the debris that had been brought over from the station. That material had been put in depressurized, unheated storage, so a scraplet thawed out only when some piece of debris was brought into the laboratory for study.

Crystallia found another hole where one of the scraplets had gotten into the conduits from her laboratory, but further exhaustive search revealed no more scraplets.

As no others were found, and all the bots were cleared, the decision was made that the ship was probably now free of them. Still, for everyone's peace of mind if nothing less, Brewster ordered all the bots to stay at least in pairs and have someone on watch in the bay at all times. By taking turns with half-watches, everyone got at least a half-watch of sleep or recharge. They hoped to avoid a repeat of the situation where all the bots got infected before anyone even suspected they were in danger.

A repair station orbiting Pluto had the capability to do a full scan of the entire ship, ensuring that there were no more scraplets aboard. The _Chicago_ would be en route seven days before they arrived there. Until cleared, they were officially a plague ship which had to be kept isolated to prevent spreading the infection.

It was going to be a long week.

A subdued group of cadets waited in their bay once the search of the ship was Dragonfly had been miserably uncomfortable before, the damage to her sensitive wings was truly painful.

Once they were allowed to move around the ship again, Shaker and Coriell took her to Medbay. There were two people ahead of them. One of the engineers had pulled a scraplet off Tripper and stomped it so hard he'd driven one of its legs through the sole of his boot into his foot. Another guy had scalded his face with hot energon when he bent over to hit one with a hammer. He said it was nothing, but his CO had ordered him to get his eyes checked. Vance ordered a tetanus booster for the guy with the sore foot, then examined the other man's burn. "Your eyes are OK. Parker, you can take it from here. What's next?"

"Dragonfly's in the bot bay to have her wing looked at."

"OK, Fire, when you've finished with Patel's foot, I'll need you to do a scan."

"Yes, Healer."

Vance went in the large bay which was set up with medical berths for bots. Shaker and Coriell were with Dragonfly. The young seeker had her wing folded in even more tightly than the fliers usually did when in their bipedal root mode. That was a guarding reflex if she'd ever seen one.

Most people who knew her wouldn't have put "Vance" and "gentle" in the same sentence, but now Coriell and Shaker were privileged to see that side of the CMO. She asked, "Still pretty bad, huh? What's going on with you?"

"There are a lot more sensors back on my neural net, but now they've self-repaired, they won't turn off."

"Well, that's a seeker's wing sensors for you. You're not going to be able to turn off something that you need to stay in the air." She got the hacker's deck and used it to set a healer's override. That would need to be repeated each joor. "Let's see what's throwing all those errors in the first place."

Vance, and Whitefire once she had finished treating the engineer with the sore foot, began to examine the seeker's wing. They were very concerned about the damage to her all-important wing strut.

When a seeker came to in Medbay after some severe injury, their first question was always would they be able to fly, not would they live. It didn't matter. It was the same question. Unless they had some very strong reason to stay here, like the promise of a reformat into a new frame or a strong bond, a flightless seeker wasn't long for this world. Vance was able to assure her, "The patch is integrating."

"Then the pain is really a good thing, like with my adult upgrades? It just means everything is healing?" The young seeker's relief testified to her fear.

Vance nodded. "Exactly. There's nothing to worry about, Cadet. I'm taking you off duty until we get back in-system. If it's still this bad after we clear inspection, I'll send you to Mars Base where they have the ability to go ahead and do the integration manually rather than wait for you to self-heal."

"Thank you, Healer."

"Lt. Coriell, I want one of the bots with her at all times. I know we can keep an eye out for scraplets, but this is something else. I had to do a medical override on her sensors. It's not just her pain sensors; her neural net is so sensitized right now that she was experiencing all those error messages as pain. I shut them all down. That's made her a lot more comfortable, but it's also thrown her sense of balance off. She could fall and injure herself, and not be aware of the injury."

Coriell said, "We'll work out a schedule."

As she followed the two bots back to the squad bay, Coriell commed Anna, who had taken the rest to the bots' mess hall. "The CMO says Dragonfly is getting better. She's on sick list though. Where are you going next?"

"We're all supposed to report to the Chief Engineer, sir."

"Cadet Earthshaker is assigned to the squad bay, CMO's orders. Report back there after Major Crystallia Is finished with you."

"Sir, yes sir."

Once her two baby birdies were back in their nest, Coriell went to her own quarters and pulled up the squad's schedules. She had to reorganize everything to be sure one of the bots was always available for Dragonfly, yet not cut into their work schedules any more than necessary.

That night, before lights out, Star decided a distraction was necessary, and browsed her collection of movie files. Monty Python's gonzo humor crossed the species barrier, and she had just bought a copy of _Monty Python and the Holy Grail _on her last liberty. She projected it on the bulkhead, and soon most of them were laughing at the movie while Anna and Firecracker kept watch.

Dragonfly sat on Shaker's lap with her brother beside them and enjoyed the movie, surrounded by her cohort. She felt safe for the first time since the scraplet infestation had been discovered.

A long eight days later, the _Chicago _reached the repair station over Pluto. Star and Shaker had bridge duty when they pulled into a repair bay. They watched as several teams of bots surrounded her with an array of scanning equipment. It took twelve hours to complete the scan, and they were under quarantine until it was done.

Finally, though, they were declared free of scraplets and permitted to dock with the station. Dragonfly was sitting in the squad bay when she received a short transmission, an order to report to the station's med bay.

"Shaker, the medics over on the station want to see me."

"Guess we better not keep 'em waiting."

"Do I just go? Or tell the LT first?"

"Can't hurt to comm the LT," he decided.

Dragonfly did so.

"Coriell."

"Dragonfly, LT. I've been ordered to medbay on the station."

"Nobody copied me-OK, go. You got somebot to walk you over there?"

"Yes, sir, Shaker's here."

"Report when they tell you something."

"Sir, yes sir!"

The two cadets went to the docking bay. Dragonfly was sick and tired of being an invalid. Even though she knew nobody was, every time someone had to walk her to medbay or the wash racks or anywhere else, she felt like everyone was staring at her. It had been a long time since a display of weakness had been an invitation to victimization, but hard-learned lessons were hard-forgotten too.

Col. Garner looked up from some work he was doing on his plane to ask how she was doing.

"Fine, sir," was her automatic response. "Reporting to medbay on the station."

"Carry on, Cadet."

"Sir, yes sir."

They waited their turn at the airlock. Some airman mostly hidden behind a huge box sailed out of the airlock and almost hit her in the face. She ducked, lost her balance and ended up spinning off her peds. There was a loud round of laughter.

Shaker caught her and helped her back to the deck.

The CAG yelled at the airman, "Watch where you're going! Cadet, are you OK?"

"Yes, sir!" she replied, her face plates hot with embarrassment.

Their turn at the airlock came and Dragonfly was glad to escape.

Pluto Station was primarily a mining outpost with a military presence. Most of the bots they passed had _Abundance _clan glyphs engraved on their armor. _Pride of Iacon_ had mostly settled in the Asteroid Belt close to Mars. There were a few human prospectors out here, but most of the humans they saw were military, with a few scientists scattered here and there, and buyers.

They saw one group of miners who turned out to be techno-organics from Riverside, Toby and Shawna's clanmates. There was no time for anything but a quick exchange of greetings and directions to the station's medbay.

Getting there required crossing the main concourse, a wide street lined with businesses of all sorts where the miners came to sell their load and spend their pay. It was a loud, rowdy place, with a lot of traffic. A lot of the bots and some of the humans were obviously three sheets to the wind on whatever their species preferred. Shaker kept them to the edge of the concourse, so that Dragonfly wouldn't get knocked over by some drunken miner. One embarrassing fall was enough.

The medbay was only marginally quieter, thanks to a techno-organic family of screeching sparklings. Shaker turned down the gain and got out a data pad, while Dragonfly chatted with the harried mother. "Are you from Riverside?"

"Yes, that's right, I'm Laina Skaggs. This is my son, Trent, and my daughter, Madison."

"Two of our cohort, Toby and Shawna, are from there. I'm Dragonfly, this is Earthshaker."

"Oh, hi! Shawna's my cousin, she's told me all about you."

Dragonfly poked Shaker. "These are Shawna's cousins, Shaker."

He turned around and grinned at the little Pretender and her even tinier sparklings. "Good to meet you, but I wish it could have been somewhere better."

"Oh, it's nothing, just our check-ups," she said. "Number three's on the way!"

"Congratulations! When are you due?" Dragonfly asked.

"Five weeks, we think. How are Shawna and Toby getting along?"

"Crazy busy. They have school, and their wedding is coming up in June. But they're doing great. It isn't easy with us out here and them back home, but you know how that is," Dragonfly said.

Laina nodded. Hers had been a close family before the Big Change, but now that cohort bonds were included in the equation, separation was even more difficult, especially with a sparkling on the way. "You guys are on the _Chicago,_ right? The whole station's been going nuts with the thing about the scraplets. Are you OK, is that why you're here?"

"Yes, but it isn't serious, just complicated. There's some fine repairs that they can't do on shipboard. I hope they can do them here but I might have to go to Marsbase."

"Oh, jeez. That sounds bad."

"Well, it kinda is, but it isn't. It'll just take forever if it has to self-repair."

"Aw, man. I hope they can take care of it for you," Laina said.

A nurse called Laina and her sparklings for their exams. Dragonfly shifted on the bot-sized bench, trying not to scrape her wings on the wall.

Shaker asked, "Are you all right?"

"Yeah, the block is wearing off. They won't be able to give me another one until after the healer sees me," she explained.

Two miners came in, one half-hauling the other, who had a broken optic and a lot of dents. The receptionist looked up. "Feldspar! You again! I thought we told you about getting into fights!"

"Hey, I was mindin' my own business when this mech-"

"Never mind!" She groaned, rolling her eyes, and buzzed the door open for them. "Bring him on back, Bauxite. Bot bay 2."

Dragonfly exchanged a look with Shaker, then settled in for a long, uncomfortable wait.

Eventually, their turn came. The medic was a purpose-built healer like First Aid, a femme named Tuneup. Her red optics marked her as a former Decepticon, though she now wore only a healer's insignia.

She checked her datapad and did a double-take. "You're the one with the scraplet bites, huh? That must have been something."

Dragonfly said, "That's one word for it."

"I'd imagine. Wing strut? Anything else?"

"That's the only thing the CMO couldn't do onboard."

"Let me have a look."

Dragonfly tried to be patient with the painful exam and treatment. She mostly succeeded—she only yelped a couple of times. Eventually, Tuneup replaced her wing panels and said, "That ought to help—shouldn't have to turn all your sensors off anymore. But you still better not fly like that until your wing strut is completely self-repaired. Accelerate into a turn and _snap! _Especially if you're in any kind of atmosphere at all."

"How long will that take?"

"Another half-orn," the healer estimated. "Don't skimp your supplements."

"Yes, Healer."

"Go on, get outta here, I got sick people to take care of."

Dragonfly was happy enough with the news not to worry about the former 'Con's lack of bedside manner. She obeyed quickly and practically dragged Shaker out of the waiting room before anybot could change their mind and keep her there.

The _Chicago_ stayed at the station for another forty-eight hours, giving the whole crew a chance for a twenty-four hour pass in two shifts. To the Captain's relief, he didn't have to send the shore patrol after any of his crew, or smooth over relations with the station. If the second shift made more than usual use of aspirin and black coffee, no one paid any attention to that—unless it was to slam hatches or talk a little too loud.

He glanced over at the cadet who was shadowing the helmsman today. "Take her out, Mister Earthshaker. Ahead five percent thrust, clear the docking assembly."

"Sir, yes, sir! Five percent thrust, sir!" Under the helmsman's careful supervision, he took the great ship out of space dock and on to her next assignment.


	4. Distress Call

(Chapter 4-Distress Call)

(Disclaimers in Chapter 1)

Cadets Nightstar and Annabelle Lennox took advantage of a short break to stand at a viewport and stare out toward the asteroid belt. From their studies, they had known that it wouldn't resemble the asteroids from Star Wars—these small bodies were much further apart .

Here and now they could not see _any_ asteroids. Star had to increase her optics' magnification and refer to a chart to find one.

That was a function of the distances involved, not the lack of asteroids. There were thousands of them. About ten percent of them were metallic in composition, and some smaller fraction of those were composed of metals that attracted the mining clans.

Many minerbots had staked claims and begun work in "the rocks" over the years since Unicron's defeat. They had been joined by various individuals who had come to the Sol system in response to Optimus Prime's summons. Many of these were former Decepticons who, wary of their reception on the organics' homeworld, preferred the rough-and-tumble outposts. Humans and techno-organics who saw a chance to make their fortune in this new frontier had started to migrate out as soon as the opportunity presented itself, and their settlements were scattered throughout the Asteroid Belt.

A brief period of expansionist ideology had started after Unicron's defeat among the nations capable of space flight, while poorer nations screamed of exclusion. The UN Security Council, welded into a strong unified force by the common threat presented by the Devourer, had the foresight to disallow extra-terrestrial territorial claims, in order to prevent future wars. After two years of wrangling, they had maneuvered such a resolution through the General Assembly. Before the war with Unicron, there had been no one to enforce UN mandates; now, though, the EDF existed. Nearly all humans still considered themselves first and foremost citizens of their nations. Nationalistic they might still be in their thinking, but even the most chauvinistic among them could see a day coming when a future generation would consider themselves Earthlings first.

With that, the floodgates opened, and the pioneers set forth. Most stations were a cultural and linguistic melting pot composed of humans from many nations, Cybertronians, and techno-organics all living as equals. As with any frontier, though, there were settlements which had been created by small, homogenous groups, whether their common ground was racial or ethnic or religious or some other factor important only to themselves.

Most communities were surrounded by the claims of individual miners, one or two of whom would independently work the asteroids which were too small to interest the large mining clans, _Pride of Iacon _and_ Abundance._

Patrolling the area, checking on these small frontier communities, and providing emergency supplies and medical care, along with law enforcement, were among the duties of the EDF.

It was a lifestyle as foreign, and therefore as fascinating, to Anna as to Star, who had spent her whole existence surrounded by clan and cohort. She wondered what it would be like to work as long as a decaorn—ten orns, or a little more than four Earth months—completely alone, working joor after joor until she had a hold full of ore, then return to a settlement just long enough to sell it and resupply, and after that to return to solitude, to start all over again. Of course, clan bonds easily allowed communications over in-system distances, so it wasn't like they didn't have anyone to talk to for all that time, but it still seemed to Star to be a very cloistered life.

A chime over the intercom distracted them: it warned everyone that it was a breem until shift change. The two cadets reported to their duty station, which today was the chart room.

One part of their mission was to confirm the charts. Uncharted asteroids with odd orbits were a danger to Earth, a fact to which Mjolnir bore mute testimony, but they posed an even greater hazard to the mining settlements. If a new asteroid turned up, it would be monitored and its orbit established, so that the EDF could take action before it impacted a populated area.

They were going to have a long joor of tracking rocks.

Across the ship, John Parker was just finishing up his shift in medbay. He hated first watch; it was too hard to sleep beforehand, and by the time his shift ended at 0600, he was wide awake again, because back home he would already have been up for an hour getting ready to report to PT. When the shift ended, he finished up and checked with CMO Vance, who was just coming on duty.

"Have you seen Whitefire?" Vance asked.

"No, she hasn't been in yet. It isn't like her to be late for her shift."

Vance looked over her shoulder at the clock. "No, it isn't. Her berth is two bays from yours. Check on her and tell her to get her aft up here. She's never done this before so I won't write her up this time if she's got a good reason."

"Yes, sir." He kicked off at the hatch and sailed along the ceiling of the main corridor until he came to the gangway. A flip and another kick sent him down the gangway, then another to the berthroom that Whitefire shared with Tripper, the chief engineer's apprentice, and the gunner's mate, Bullseye. Of course that poor spark had immediately picked up the nickname Bullshit as soon as he joined the EDS, but the joke had long since faded into the scenery. Now most everyone called him BS, even the officers.

John dropped to the deck to push the buzzer set at human level. No answer, but he could feel vibrations through the deck indicating that a bot was moving around in there. "Whitefire? You in there? You're late and Vance is looking for you!"

There was a crash inside. John opened the hatch—unless there was an official reason, they were never locked, and he had heard enough bots hit the deck to know what it sounded like.

He found the healer's apprentice unconscious—at first he thought she was offline, but then he heard a fan whining. "Whitefire!" He reached for his commlink. "Medic to Squad Bay twelve, hangar deck! Repeat, medic to Squad Bay twelve, hangar deck!"

A quick exam revealed no reason for Whitefire's collapse. He plugged a hardline from his suit computer to a port in her wrist, praying his co-worker had only succumbed to high-grade. If she had, it wasn't the first time he'd seen the malady, not with the Little Twins around. But her plight didn't seem like that, so he pulled up the computer's diagnostic program. It wouldn't tell him as much as the hacker's decks down in medbay, but at least it would give him an idea where to start.

Her batteries were almost dead, which had thrown her into stasis lock, but her generator should have kicked on to convert energon to the electrical energy that powered her processor. It hadn't. He pulled a power line from a wall compartment and found a jack among her wrist ports that it fit. An indicator, perilously near the terminal end of its redline, started creeping back the other way.

He was kept busy keeping an eye on other indicators until Vance burst through the hatch and kicked off the bulkhead to land next to him. She dropped to her knees, elbowing him out of the way, and demanded, "Report!"

"I found the patient in deep stasis lock, Doctor. She presented with power reserves at less than one percent of capacity and no generator function. I connected her to external power and monitored until the present time."

"Good work, Parker. Search the bay and see if there's any indication of what caused this. A healthy femme like Whitefire shouldn't have had a generator failure without any warning, and if anything had been wrong, we would have seen some indication when we were getting the scraplets."

John knew things like that happened. Otherwise healthy young people, both human and Cybertronian, sometimes had some silent problem which, without warning, could prove fatal.

But he also realized it was absolutely unacceptable to Stephanie Vance that such a thing happen on _her_ watch.

John wasn't sure which berth was Whitefire's, since all of them were identical, as well as spotless. Bots didn't tend to collect a lot of "stuff." He zoomed over to the row of lockers, and checked the labels until he found hers. It contained only her medical kit and some datapads.

"I don't see anything here, Dr. Vance. Maybe she subspaced something?"

"If she did, it's staying there for now. I'm not turning out her hold until she's carrying more of a charge," Vance replied. "Did you pull her event log already?"

"No, sir, I don't have the codes for that."

Vance hardlined her own deck to one of Whitefire's dataports and input her authorization code on the touch screen. "I knew when she was late that something was wrong. Well here—this can't be right." She pulled out a flexible keyboard, slapped it down on the deck, and started typing.

John could do nothing but wait patiently. He could see that Vance was trouble-shooting her generator, but the holographic screen of the comp strapped to her arm was at the wrong angle for him to determine anything else.

Two pararescue crewmen appeared in response to John's emergency call. "Anything we can do to help, Doc?"

"Stand by a minute. This doesn't make any fuckin' sense." Vance confirmed the reading, then sent an override that allowed her to unlatch the apprentice's chest plates. She activated a switch, and Whitefire's generator sputtered to life. After she confirmed that it was outputting current properly, she disconnected the wall line and gave it to Parker to put it away.

"What happened to her, Doctor Vance?"

"Do I have to review medical ethics on patient privacy with any of you?"

"No, sir! I'll find a bot to help move her to medbay, Doc."

"For now, we're not giving out any more information than that she collapsed."

"Yes, sir."

That was soon accomplished. Once their assistants returned to their duties, Vance turned to Parker. "Has Whitefire ever mentioned anything to you about being depressed?"

"No," he said. "Do you mean she did this deliberately?"

"It's the only thing that makes sense. Bots can stay in stasis-lock for a long, long time on just a tiny bit of energon, because it vastly reduces the amount of energy drawn by their spark and processor. But they still need their generator online to provide that energy, or access to some other source such as that wall line, or a stasis pod. Whitefire's generator was shut down—turned off deliberately. I turned it back on with a medical override." Vance checked the monitors. "She should come out of stasis on her own as soon as she builds up enough of a power reserve to online her processor." She eyed her young assistant. "You know you saved her life today, don't you? If you hadn't taken the actions you did, we would not have found her in time. And I elbowed you aside because you have to remember to move out of the senior medical officer's way."

John nodded in acknowledgment of the correction, but sidestepped the rest, saying only, "I—I didn't realize how easy it is for bots to offline themselves."

"Well, they have at least as strong a will to live as we do. It isn't any easier for them to do that than for you or I to take a one-way trip out an airlock. The hard part is deciding to off yourself, not finding a way to do it."

Suicide rates were always higher in the military than among civilians; it was an unavoidable consequence of stress, and also the result of being away from the support of family and friends for extended periods. That had always been true in all armies, human and Cybertronian alike. But few soldiers got infested—twice—with something that could eat them alive, or even assisted in the autopsy of someone that had happened to.

Vance figured they were lucky that more than one bot hadn't flipped out after the scraplet incident. She hoped this would be the worst repercussion, but feared it wouldn't be the only one.

Earthshaker and Firecracker were up to their elbows in an F-28's engine, under the supervision of the head mechanic, Chief Master Sergeant Dale Daughtry. Chief Daughtry was in his early fifties, and almost had his thirty in.

"You two might be wondering what this has to do with you. If Cadet Dragonfly gets hurt in alt form and can't transform back to root mode, all of you need to understand how her alt works so that you'll be able to help her. I was on the ground in DC when Thundercracker hit the NEST base. If there hadn't been somebody there who was checked out on F-22's he wouldn't have made it long enough for Jolt to get to him. Most Cybertronians understand their own alt, but not necessarily anyone else's."

Firecracker said, "At least this one is a lot more like the Cybertronian flying vehicles that Wheeljack had us study."

"These two planes, the F-28 and the F-27s that the Wolf Pack flies," said Daughtry, wiping a sweaty forehead on his jumpsuit sleeve, "were designed to take down enemy seekers. They have approximately the same airframe limitations that seekers do. Now, let's take a look at the fuel delivery system. This is a hybrid of human and Cybertronian technology."

The two cadets sharpened their focus, and the lecture went on.

The call that would change lives came through at 09:10:37 Zulu. The cohort members most affected by it were in recharge, or sleep, at the time.

"_Chicago_, this is Farseeker of _Pride of Iacon_. We have an emergency and are seeking assistance. Please respond."

At a nod from the XO, Dragonfly, on Comms that day, opened a line for her. "Farseeker, this is _Chicago_. We are homing in on your signal; state emergency."

"No! I – I mean – _Chicago_, emergency is not at our location. I repeat, the emergency is not at our location."

"Where is your emergency?" XO said in her calm voice.

The radio spat coordinates. "Copy that. Helm, correct course to new heading," The XO said. "Where are you?"

Another flow of coordinates. The crew looked at each other, even at Dragonfly. Those locations were almost on the other side of the belt from one another, and the _Chicago_ was actually closer than the miner colony to the site.

"Can you give us an idea of the nature of the emergency?" the XO said.

"Yes! A Cybertronian and his human friend are trapped in a slide, a cave-in, there!"

The XO sent orders for a rescue squad, all the BB's not now on duty, and from Medical, Vance and her assistant, who turned out to be Parker, to ready for a deployment that might prove lengthy. "How are you aware of that, sir?" she said back to the jittery voice whose image was snow.

"How – what does it matter! Clan bond!"

"Thank you, sir." She did not turn off the microphone, and the caller heard her say, "Helm, take us up out of this minefield and over to an insert point for new coordinates. Your discretion, Leonard, you may consult with Cadet Navigator if you like. Farseeker, we will be there as soon as possible."

"Yes. Thank you! We'll be there too."

The line went dead. The bridge resumed normal motion, normal chatter, its normal levels of activity and tension. The XO strolled over to the Dragonfly, and said, loudly, "You did good to keep your head today, Dragonfly."

"T-Thank you, sir," said Dragonfly.

"Next time, though," the XO continued, in a normal tone of voice, "you might remember that you do not wait for anyone's permission to put an emergency call through. They ID it as an emergency, you put it through on speakers." She paused. "They teach you that yet?"

"If they have, sir, I overlooked it in the heat of the moment," the cadet said honestly.

"Still," XO said, settling to watch the display as the ship moved beyond the asteroid field, and swept to its re-entry point, "you did good, today. My first day on comms, an emergency came through and I froze. So you're ahead of the game, Dragonfly. You figured out the second thing to do after you get thawed. You just did it third."

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir," said Dragonfly.

In fact, the XO found that that particular instruction had not, in fact, been passed to cadets; while one could argue that it was a matter of common sense, said sense does not kick in when stress is present.

So she removed the need for common sense in the period before battle-smarts were acquired, and saved many lives thereby.

Their insert point was deadlier than it appeared to be. This was largely because it was twice as densely filled with asteroids roughly a quarter the size of those in their mapping area, and thus appeared to be empty. Crystallia put the entire ships' company into their suits, with their helmets hung from their waists.

"Place's fulla holers," one engineer groused.

"Holers?" said Earthshaker, working as fast as he could on the present project.

"Yeah. Big enough to put a hole in the plating, not usually worth anything. A flyin' gravel pit."

Which more or less described it, if the "gravel pit" were expanded to cosmic scale. If Engineering had a porthole, Shaker could have watched the zip and sizzle of asteroids flaring to destruction on _Chicago_'s shields, creating a sort of portable aurora which surrounded her.

He smiled at the thought, and kept working. Surely somebot would have a recording.

"Farseeker of _Pride of Iacon_, this is Stephanie Vance, CMO of the EDF Chicago."

"CMO Vance, this is Farseeker."

"Farseeker, I need to know how much oxygen Jordan Wilson carried with him. Do you have that information?"

Cybertronian conversation ensured, off-mic but audible. Farseeker sent, "CMO Vance, at last-greeting, Lodestone carried two cylinders of oxygen and six of water for his human friend, along with some edible substances. Last-greeting took place at the spaceport, so the human was wearing a third cylinder."

"Do you know the approximate weight of Lodestone himself?"

More Cybertronian. Then Farseeker gave it to her in Cybertronian units. She could cope with that. "When did they leave you?"

Farseeker said, "Seven point nine-two joor ago."

"Thank you, Farseeker. We'll do our best to get them back to you."

"Thank you, _Chicago_." Farseeker cut the connection.

Four cylinders, one tapped before takeoff, and there was a possibility that one had been used up before they reached their destination. If she factored in the suit's scrubbing capabilities, the worst-case scenario was that she had only twelve hours to get Jordan out, or get oxygen to him.

As for the best case, she wasn't going to fret because it gave them only three hours more.

The Baby Birdies, including Dragonfly, were told to wait for Coriell at the departure dock. They were joined shortly by Crystallia, Vance, Sensors and Communications Officer Capt. Gregori "Sparky" Gregorov, and a pale and silent organic who introduced herself as "Carter, Sensors and Comms."

When Coriell showed up, she was accompanied by Daughtry, another human engineer, and two more mechanics.

Crystallia was in command of the expedition. She barked orders, they obeyed them, and the C_hicago_ brought them silently to their destination.

They prepared to debark the _Chicago_ while she remained in orbit around the little rock. Vance surprised Earthshaker on the way in by saying to him quietly, "Get a tow line and report back here."

Mystified, he obeyed her. Twenty minutes later, Dragonfly soared and swung and dipped, as free of the line connecting her to Earthshaker as hard turns and powerful sweeps could make her. Joy filled her spark, and it was enough for Dragonfly that Earthshaker felt it too, that he shared her dipping, flirting, tethered flight.

She had not expected to fly tethered again. In zero gravity, though, she was pain-free … and happier than she had ever thought to be again.

But then at least a part of her happiness was that she was tethered to Earthshaker.

The asteroid presented a glum face to the world, seeming to construct a vaguely human frown around the very large reverse pimple of the cave-in, one whose "head" was far below the surface, on the chin of its large round white face.

They landed very close to the site of the cave-in, a depressed strip that ran a good half-kilometer around the asteroid. It left the tiny body looking as if someone had begun to peel an orange, and then stopped abruptly.

Crystallia, Carter, and Sparky wasted no time at all, and began to shuffle along the surface, frequently stopping to stoop or bend to take readings, or just lock knees and ride out a minor quake. Five minutes after that they were bouncing their data off one another, with Parker and Vance attempting to take readings of their own, until Crystallia performed a confirmation sweep and told them exactly where and how far below the surface the two victims were.

Carter pronounced herself unable to pick up any radio broadcasts from the two, which brought everyone's eyebrows down. It could mean a number of things: that the two were lying offline or processor-injured, or had fallen just hard enough to kill their radios, without injuring themselves at all.

By the time any of them thought to ask Dragonfly to use her forward sensors, she was remote-sampling a thin, shallow vein of rock along a promising fault which led directly to them.

"It's a pipe," she said to Crystallia. "Nothing on the inside, smooth surfaces. Maybe it was gas-filled at one point, but that's gone now. It runs toward the center at about a fifty-degree angle. The only trouble is, it's too small for me to get through."

"Why we have the humans along," Crystallia told her, making no reference at all to the fact that Vance had forbidden any further flight to Dragonfly. "Lennox is tiny enough to crawl right in there, and she could take an extra oh-two tank to Jordan. Maybe even two."

"You know what," Dragonfly said, looking at Nightstar and Annabelle, "Star can get in there, where I can't. It doesn't become too small for her until the very end. Star could subspace the supplies, Lennox could take the stuff through that bottleneck, once they get there, while Star enlarges the space. That way, when they're stable, maybe they can climb back up the same way?"

"Lodestar's a lot bigger than either one of you. I think I'll ask the _Chi-town _to burn a hole right into their present accommodations, and then we'll just swoop down and pick 'em up."

Alas for the well-laid plan.

Star subspaced two tanks, food, energon, and a hefty medical kit. That done, she stood at attention as Crystallia looked them both over.

This was not a parade inspection. This was a get-it-right-or-it'll-kill-you inspection, one more pair of eyes used as a backup.

Because Crystallia knew, if the cohort did not, that once the two of them were in tube, their safety net was gone.

The cohort. The early-warning system all its members had come to rely on.

On this rock, if trouble struck, the cohort members on the surface would be powerless to help their subterranean fellows.

Staring at Anna, she said, "There's something wrong with the knot you used to attach the medical scanner. Take it off and re-tie it."

Without complaint, Anna retied it, making a careful mental review of the procedure as she did so. This time Crystallia nodded. If the scanner got hung up on anything, and Anna could not free it, she would be able to release the knot with one hand.

"It's dangerous down there," the engineer said flatly. "You get in there, maybe we will and maybe we won't be able to recover you, if we get a quake."

Femme and human woman looked at each other, and the cohort bond was suddenly alive with trepidation. Then, in unison, they barked, "Sir yes sir!"

"So you're still volunteering?"

"Sir, yes sir," said Anna. "In fact, sir, it seems we are the only logical choices for this assignment."

"True enough. Doesn't mean I don't want you to be careful. Primus be with you."

They crawled into the hole that Earthshaker had excavated, taking care not to smash the brittle rock surrounding them. The material was red, pink, off-white, mottled; it looked as if it had been sloppily layered into the hole and allowed to harden before the central material was removed.

When Vance poked her head in out of curiosity, she thought that it looked exactly like a fossilized esophagus.

Like many esophagi, it was slippery. Anna rappelled down after Star, but slid helplessly across the slick walls, grappling for a purchase that was not there. Star solved the problem by carefully kicking some into the walls for Anna.

Anna, for her part, had enjoyed rock climbing, and very much enjoyed repeating the experience without gravity dictating which way "down" was. Star was careful in her placement of the holds, so that Anna had to stretch to get from one to the next, but was never in danger.

Later, Anna would remember thinking that you just couldn't beat having a best friend with a processor.

::We're at the bottom,:: Star sent. ::It was necessary to widen the opening, but Lennox is going through now. I've placed the tanks and med supplies within her reach. This area, though, is tectonically unstable.::

"Roger that, cadet," Coriell sent. "Keep your line open."

::Sir. Shall I channel the visual feed as well?::

"Good thought, cadet. Do that."

On the surface, the team hastily reconfigured a computer to display Star's visual feed. They also heard some crunching noises, and then Anna's voice came over the line, "Got it! Pass me the tanks, will you?"

Crunch, scrape, slither. Crunch, scrape: the video was a jigging view of the walls of the striated rock esophagus. Coriell sent, "Lennox! Turn your suit mic on and leave it on!"

"Sir!" the cadet responded, and the surface team heard her breathing for a moment, accompanied by some far-off scrapes. Anna squiggled through an opening just slightly too small for her in any dimension, shoulders scraping the rock, knees impacting it before she could get leverage. She kept wriggling, belly-down, getting the purchase she could with hips and elbows … and suddenly she was free.

She was in a small rock-walled cubical chamber, with a more-or-less flat floor. The mech was in front of her. She couldn't see another human. "I have found Lodestone, but not Wilson. Do you copy?"

He didn't look as massive as he was, at first glance. Anna had seen miners before; though they were only about three meters tall, they weren't small bots, even in root mode. He was in his ore carrier form at the moment, which took up even more volume due to its ore compartment. He took up a fair bit of the terminal bubble, a cube roughly ten meters on a side.

Her suit, which was studded with monitors, gave her a head's-up: energon was present, boiled off into the vacuum, forming a thin and volatile atmosphere within the tube. "Star, be aware there is sublimated energon present. Try to avoid creating any sources of ignition."

"Roger that," Star responded. "Suggest sending down an air line to force it out of here before anyone tries to dig into this tunnel."

Crystallia replied, "We don't have the air supply to do that, cadet. What do you estimate the open volume in there?"

"About—one thousand cubic meters, less Lodestone's volume...approximately 950 cubic meters."

"I'll have the _Shytown_ send over some fire suppressant foam. Spray the enclosure full of that before they break through. Try not to blow yourself sky high before then."

"Yes, sir!"

"Lennox, have you located Wilson yet?"

"Not yet, sir." There was no evidence of blood. Anna didn't think Lodestone had landed on him.

"Copy, Lennox. Lodestone, but not Wilson. Is Lodestone still on-line?"

"Negative, sir. I have sent a wake-pulse, but he seems still … oh, no. No, I spoke too soon." There was a pause and a small grinding noise, and then she said, "Lodestone of _Pride of Iacon_, I am Cadet Annabelle Lennox of the EDF ship _Chicago_. Can you hear me?"

They couldn't see it, up top, but Anna reached out and laid her gloved hand on Lodestone's front quarter panel. "Lodestone, can you hear me?"

She looked him over more critically. Was anything out of place? Anything obviously unlocked, bashed off, crumpled, sparking?

The only visible damage was a large dent in his dorsal plate, about the size of the large boulder that was blocking his cargo hatch, but she didn't want to try climbing over an injured mech who hadn't fully booted up yet; that was a good way to get propelled across the room. She also needed to find out where Wilson was and get him the spare O2, and that might be more urgent.

Star began working, very carefully, to open up the tunnel. She wouldn't be able to enlarge it enough to get Lodestone out, but if she could get her aft out of the way, it would make a lot more room to pull supplies down.

Anna sent a stronger activation code. "Lodestone! Come on, get with it and talk to me, mech!"

The miner's optics flickered, and he groaned over a dozen radio frequencies. "What the _slag_ hit me? Jordan? Who're you? What happened?"

"I'm Lennox, off the _Chicago_," she repeated. "It looks like you had a collapse. Where's your partner?"

"He's—he took shelter in my ore hold."

"Is he conscious?"

"Yes, but his radio is out. I can hear him when he puts his helmet up against my plating."

"OK. Does he have suit integrity?"

There was a pause while Lodestone checked. "He says he patched a leak, but he's low on oxygen."

"I have spare tanks for him. I need you to open your cargo hatch, can you do that for me? Slow and easy—we have sublimated energon here, don't want a flash ignition."

Lodestone tried, but the huge rock was blocking him from opening the hatch more than a scant two-thirds of a meter. Anna shined her light in, and saw a human in a space suit lying amid a pile of ore. There was a suit patch on his left leg, right above his ankle; his foot lay at an odd angle to the leg.

Whatever had holed his suit had also broken his leg. She pushed the O2 tanks inside, crawled through the opening after them.

"How are you doing?" she said, once she put her helmet to his. He had powered down lights, mics, anything not urgent to life support, to slow the draw on his batteries. "Any problems except the leg?"

"No, I'm fine, outside of seeing things. You, for instance."

"Oh, I'm real enough. Your partner?"

"Something bounced around in that last big quake and hit Lodes hard, knocked him off-line for a while."

"I think I see where it hit his back. Let's get this oh-two hooked up, then I'll see what I can do for him, okay?"

"Okay."

She pulled the tank whose indicator was all the way over into the red free, placing the full one in its holder. The couplings were easy, even in suit gloves, but it all took time. Once the couplings were in place, she saw that he had minutes left on his spare tank – but she still needed to be sure that turning on the new tank didn't spew its precious cargo into the little cube with them, as far beyond reach as if it were on Mars Base.

Tank to external coupling, secure; external coupling to regulator, secure; regulator to internal coupling, secure. Ex-vent to scrubber, secure; scrubber to re-vent, secure; re-vent to regulator, secure. Anna held her breath and turned the lever.

"Oh, man, that smells good!"

She couldn't see his face through the suit's helmet, since he was powered-down as far as possible, but Anna smiled. "Good to hear that. On my way to help out your partner."

"See you later, angel."

_Did he actually say that to __me?_ she wondered, on her way into Lodestone's circle of vision.

The injured mech focused on her, and that brought Anna back to reality in a hurry. He was drooping; she knew that meant he couldn't keep pressure in his energon system.

"Lodestone, I'm going to climb over you and take a look at your back. Is that all right with you?"

He nodded once, listlessly, and Anna's hands and feet seemed to take on lives of their own. Suddenly she was behind him, and she could see exactly what the problem was.

Two panels had split apart along a transformation seam on Lodestone's back, and that injury had also torn open an energon line. Not a big one, but blobs of energon were moving away from the injury with the impulsion given them by Lodestone's fuel pressure, coagulating under the zero-G into those lovely blue round globules that she had seen; they gave off swirls of sublimation as they moved into the space.

She stopped dead. Sent, "Lodestone, I can see the injury from here. I can get it, I think. Do you have any sealant pads in your subspace? Star, do you? Mine are for minor injuries. They aren't big enough for this."

There was an almighty crunch and then a careful rending of rock at the site of the small hole Anna had struggled through to reach the miners, and Star, suddenly a third large person in a room pretty small for one large and two small sentient beings to begin with, said, "Lemme look."

"Who're you?" Lodestone slurred.

"Nightstar of Diego Garcia," the femme replied. "Can you lean forward a bit?"

"Sure. Jordan, you wanna – oh, you can't."

"I'll help him," Anna said. "Pull him forward, right?"

"Far's you can."

She clambered back inside. "You heard, yeah?"

"Sure. Gonna need the help, though; I tried and with this leg..." he shrugged.

Anna sent, "Star, wait a minute. I"ve gotta splint his leg; if I try to move him without doing that, and the fracture is compound, it might hole his suit."

Crystallia said, "Negatory on that one, Lennox. Hold on a minute. Vance has to finish what she's guiding Nightstar through, then we'll have you turn your helmet cam on." Anna heard the healer's voice, too far out of mic range to be understandable, and then Crystallia said, "Here's Vance. Turn on your helmet cam, Lennox."

There wasn't much to be seen through Jordan Wilson's suit: only a leg which took a turn impossible to healthy legs just above the ankle. "Well, he managed to ding himself up pretty good," Vance said. "Take four, I repeat four, of your line patches. First one goes around the break. Next two go above and below it, overlapping the break, and the last one on top of those two, centered over the first. Clear?"

"Sir yes sir. Beginning now." Anna laid out four of the patches, and had to move his leg to get the first one into placed. Jordan murmured something, but didn't flinch, though she saw his hands clench.

Thinking she could minimize the movement if she laid the patches out all at once, she did that, and initiated their integration.

Jordan's suit, of course, had no Cybertronian neural component, so those parts of the patches turned pink and died. The balance, a bright orange, snugged down to the surface of his suit, and applied pressure to the wound.

"Lennox," Vance said calmly, "take Jordan's heel and pull gently, very gently, away from his body, in as straight a line as you can manage, while the patches set."

Jordan didn't scream, but he went limp momentarily. Then he said a few words in Cybertronian Anna had shocked Will Lennox by knowing before her thirteenth birthday.

"You all right?"

"No," he said drily. "Broke my leg."

She snorted a laugh. "Well, let's get to the part where I pull you across the floor."

"Okay, angel."

Vance, who could hear only Anna's part of the conversation (and couldn't see her face, which she thought must be bright red) said, "Do one more thing before you get to that, Lennox. Have Nightstar get the splints out of her subspace, and apply one to that leg. It should reach from ankle to above the knee."

The angel did that little thing, to the accompaniment of a few more Cybertronian swears. Then she hooked her gloves under her patient's armpits, and pulled him across the floor of Lodestar's ore hold, pausing once or twice to let a quake subside.

Lodestone leaned forward, or more accurately drooped in the desired direction, and Star applied the patch to the torn line in his back, working as quickly as she could. That done, she pulled out a cube of energon and offered it to Lodestone, who mutely shook his head.

"Commander Vance, Lodestone has declined energon. Permission to tap a wrist port, and administer directly?"

"Permission granted, cadet."

This would have been much easier if he had been in root mode rather than his ore carrier alt. Star requested schematics to find out where a miner's wrist ports went when he transformed, then located the panel on his lower right front quadrant. She tapped the cube, and attached the tap to his wrist port.

His fields strengthened just as Anna said, "Jordan is conscious again. He tells me that he found a flaw in the underlayment of this room. He says that if you breach the ceiling, the floor will collapse, and the walls will be pushed together catastrophically."

"Well, crap," Crystallia under her breath. Then, "Copy, Lennox. We understand. We'll find another way to get you out."

A large quake shook them, and Jordan clenched his injured knee. Anna sent, "The area is tectonically unstable as well. We are experiencing quakes." When she listened to recordings of the mission proceedings later, she was astonished to hear how calm she sounded; when the quake began, her heart had leapt into her throat, and she felt a bolt of pure fear race across her chest.

Crystallia said, "I want you to repeat what I say exactly to Jordan, Lennox. I've already uploaded Lodestone's knowledge of the area's geology, but Jordan may have information he doesn't. Ready to play recorder?"

"Sir yes sir."

She would never remember most of it. Gabbro, pyroclastics, basaltic outcroppings. What did become clear was that the easiest, most stable way in would be the fissured wall which lay to Anna's left as she crawled inside.

"ETA twenty breem," Crystallia said. "Beginning excavation now."

Twenty breem; about two and a half human hours. Vance sent, "Talk to Jordan, Anna. Keep him awake. I don't want him sliding into shock. Nightstar, you too. We'll be there as soon as we can."

The trapped pairs heard them, of course, long before they saw their rescuers. Felt them, too: the vibrations of drilling and the nerve-racking shudders of explosion traveled up through the rock, into Lodestar's hold, through Anna's boots and suit.

Anna didn't remember much of the rescue itself. It seemed as if she and Jordan were alone, talking about anything under the sun, and then suddenly, Nightstar sent, "They're here!"

Vance's transmission was simple. "Lennox, stay with Jordan. We'll get you out on the _Chicago_, where there's air and pressure. Just sit tight. Won't be long."

She felt the change in gravity from "a little" to "none at all," and after a few minutes, there was a small jolt as Lodestone maglocked to the Chicago's deck. Jordan moved a little, feverishly, and she patted his hand. "Not too much longer," she said, and he turned on his helmet light.

He looked a little like her father, although his face was craggier. Dark hair, hazel eyes, even features. "Hey, angel," he said, and smiled, just as Lodestone opened his ore hold, and the gray of the _Chicago_'s bulkheads signaled the end of their adventures.

Four hours later, after his leg had been set, Jordan velcroed to the wall beside his friend and partner.

"Hey, Lodes. Big day."

"Was, wasn't it? Between finding what we found, and ... the rest of it."

"I wouldn't have said I was a believer in bonding at first sight. You?"

"Still not. The opportunity for bonding, maybe. I'm pursuing it. You?"

"Yeah! It was so great talkin' to Anna, you know? We didn't have anything to do but get acquainted with each other."

"Yeah. Me and Star, too."

"What clan and sept?"

"Diego Garcia, Lennox-Ironhide."

"Whoa, Ironhide, really? Now that's disturbing. Not sure I want that guy as a father-in-law."

Lodestar grinned at his partner. "Like you have a choice."

"True enough." Jordan Wilson, soon to be of Wilson-Lodestone Station, a sept of both Lennox-Ironhide and _Pride of Iacon_ clans, took the painkiller he had been prescribed, and went to sleep next to his best friend.

Anna and Nightstarwere doing much the same thing. Star stretched, yawned, and said, "I didn't think I'd ever get all the grit out of my seams. Thanks, Anna."

"No problem. Exciting day, huh?"

"It was, wasn't it? Our first real mission, it felt like."

"Yes. Star…what's going on with you and Lodestone?"

Star circulated extra cooling fluid to her facial fins: she blushed. "I don't know. I want to talk to Chromia. Maybe I'll see Whitefire. I think … I think there's a bond forming between us."

"Holy cow, really? On what, four hours' acquaintance? Isn't that unusual?"

"Yeah, but it's not unheard of." She smiled at her best friend, who had set a small reading light up, and velcroed her current novel next to her. "And you and Jordan?"

Anna blew out a breath. "It's usually a little slower for humans. But yeah, there's something there…I'm too young, Star. I've got things I wanna do before I settle down. Particularly if I'm going to settle down in the asteroid belt. I planned a career in the EDF. I still want that, don't want to give it up."

"Yeah. And I forgot that you have a little time, not a lot of time. I forget that you're not a 'bot, even when I'm looking straight at you."

"Well, thanks, I think."

"Smart aft. Anyway, what are you going to do about it?"

"Stay in contact with him. Keep talking. That's the only way I have to learn who he really is. Can't hardline."

"One of your species' many drawbacks."

"Frag you, metalhead." Anna grinned at her, and opened her book.

"Whatcha readin'?"

"Bad book. The kind where two people's eyes meet across a crowded room, and they're in love forever, but their parents hate each other, and won't allow them to bond."

"Oh. Not like you and Jordan, then. What's it called?"

"I sure hope not. _Romeo and Juliet._"


	5. New Horizons, Part 1

Chapter 5 – New Horizons, Part 1

Disclaimers in Chapter 1

The shuttle going down to Mars Base was full of excited people. Most of them had a forty-eight hour pass, as the _Chicago _was expected to remain at the Base for four days before returning to patrol the asteroid belt.

Dragonfly, maglocked between Shaker and Star, was headed straight to Mars Base medbay, in the hopes of returning to the _Chicago _on her own wings_._

Skyrocket flew in formation with the shuttle. And if Dragonfly only hoped, did not know with certainty, that she would fly back to the _Chicago_, she did not allow that to dampen her joy at being spaceborne, and maglocked to two of her cohort.

Whitefire, meanwhile, was not enjoying the trip nearly so much.

A healer called Smokescreen would conduct a programming audit for her, _on_ her, and that…she had never before allowed anyone not cohort past her firewalls. _All_ her firewalls, and Smokescreen was not even clan. Whitefire swallowed.

On the other hand, Ratchet himself had told her, her Craftmaster standing beside her, "Yes. It's true that some programming auditors went over to the Decepticons. Soundwave was one of them. But Smokey's ethics and integrity are beyond reproach."

"Craft Head," she had said, her vocalizer shaking, "would you allow him to work on you?"

Ratchet had sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose between two digits. "Once a vorn, he performs a line-by-line audit of my programming, Whitefire. The one thing we healers cannot afford is to allow our lines of code to become corrupt, particularly in repair-procedure files. I encourage you to book your second session with him when you see him this time."

That was reassuring, but still…she would allow someone she had never met before, not cohort nor even clan, past all of her firewalls. She shivered, and Stephanie Vance, seated next to her, patted her leg armor.

Vance was torn between two guilts. She wanted to be aboard the _Chi-town_, just in case. And she wanted to be here, with Whitefire.

She would remember Crystallia's quiet voice for the rest of her life. There had been no accusation in it, which somehow made it worse.

"She's been looking to you as a craftmaster, Healer Vance. Among us, that relationship is more parental than supervisory, or instruction-based."

So she'd passed the information along; they were still learning about one another, human and mechanoid species. And now she was here, on a shuttle bound for Mars Base.

She patted Whitefire's leg armor once more. "It's going to be all right," she said gently.

The Cybertronian turned her helm to look at Vance. "How do you know that?"

"Because if this Smokescreen doesn't make it so, I will make him very, very sorry."

Whitefire said nothing, but the ends of her mouthplates tipped up slightly, and she relaxed.

Mars Base had grown tremendously in the six years since its founding. The main and science domes were at capacity, and another residence dome was under construction. Both _Pride of Iacon_ and _Abundance_ had large clanholds built around their colony ships' landing pads—pressurized habitat blocks and work-spaces, warehouses and ore storage. Foundries produced the advanced metals that the Cybertronians required. Although extensive recycling was practiced, it was no longer necessary to scrounge whatever was available to repair an injury.

Human areas were growing quickly, as well. As their species was wont to do, they flocked to the opportunities granted by the opening of a new frontier. Workers established themselves, then sent for their families. Scientists came in droves to study their sister planet. The garden level under the main dome had been expanded by four levels, and the new residence dome had even larger garden levels, and more of them, to provide enough food for everyone.

The humans who lived at Mars Base and farther out were, of necessity, vegetarian, though most of them would eat meat if it was offered. (The restaurants on Mars paid a fortune to have freeze-dried meat shipped up, but the taste…) Rumors of a steak plant under development in the Mars Base botany labs seemed to crop up from time to time, so far without result.

A spaceport had grown up to meet the new city's needs. The shuttle landed and a sealed walkway extended from the terminal, seamlessly linking with the outer hatch of the shuttle's airlock.

Strictly in order, the Chicago personnel got up seat by seat and filed through the walkway tube, which was close quarters for the bots. Any larger than they would have had to go outside and enter Mars Base by way of the original, huge airlock, big enough for Prime to walk through without ducking his helm.

Inside, the noise of the concourse hit them like a wall. Mecha of all descriptions rattled, clanked, and rumbled by on their way from one place to another. Miners, who generally arrived under their own power rather than on a shuttle, formed a steady stream between the airlocks and the ore brokers' establishments. A glittering curtain filled the huge archway to the brokerages, as an ionization field collected metal dust and other particulates before the cloud could escape the trading floor to the main concourse.

They paused to watch for a while as the miners emptied their cargo onto the trading floor and bargained with brokers both Cybertronian and human. Eventually, deals were struck, bank credit was transferred, and the ore would be loaded into a hauler's cargo space to be taken either to the foundry or aboard one of the huge, lumbering cargo barges for transport to the High Port and distribution to the foundries of Earth.

Even the ore dust sifted from the air would be separated into its constituent parts, and all of it used for something.

A small group of bots, slender, graceful, their lightweight, iridescent armor shimmering under the concourse lights, passed by on their way deeper into the dome. A small island of serenity moved with them through the bustling crowd. Dragonfly asked quietly, "What kind of mecha are those? They're beautiful! I've never seen anyone like that before!"

Whitefire supplied the glyph to the bots and then explained to the humans, "They're...English doesn't have a word. Japanese does, though they're not exactly _geisha_, but that word, 'art-person,' is close. We never had them in the clanholds. They lived in cities like Iacon. I don't know where they came from, I thought they were all deactivated long ago. They collect songs, poetry, stories, dances...they're like living libraries of our culture."

Dragonfly, optics sparkling, said, "Oh, wow! I want to talk to one of them!"

At the airlocked entrance to the tunnel to the science dome, Vance, Whitefire, and the cadets split off from the main shore leave party. Whitefire and Star transformed to alt mode, to offer the CMO, Lennox, and Parker a ride.

The science dome was quieter, but just as active. It was lunch time, and the tunnel opened into the mezzanine, a large open area surrounded by shops which catered to the scientists who lived, worked, and studied here. Groups of humans eating their lunch and bots taking a break were discussing everything from Martian geology, to Manchester United's chances in their next match, to a group comparing the views of a Kaosian philosopher with those of Friedrich Nietzsche.

A sign between two stores led to a ramp up to the hospital level. It was quieter up there, but no less busy. Signs in several languages pointed to the Cybertronian and human emergency rooms. Other signs pointed to other departments and offices.

Smokescreen had only a discreet sign in the building directory with his name and office suite. It was on the next floor up, while the orthopedics department where Dragonfly had an appointment was on this floor.

Whitefire stalled, taking a ramp rather than the nearby elevator. Once they reached the office level, she stopped once to look at a sculpture, and another time to stare out a window.

Vaughn said, "Look. Standing around getting yourself even more upset isn't helping. Let's just go and get it over with."

Whitefire said, "I know, Craftmaster, it's just...I'm being an idiot. You're right."

"Well, I know I'm right, but I don't think you're being an idiot. Ratchet told me exactly why people look at these guys funny. But I checked him out with everybody I could _think_ of, and they all said he's legit."

"I'm probably being silly, dragging my Craftmaster with me."

"No. I'm happy to come with you," Vance assured her, and stopped herself from rushing into babble whose burden would have been "This is all my fault anyway." Whitefire relaxed just a tiny bit, and they kept going until they found Smokescreen's office suite at the end of the corridor.

Dragonfly and her cohort found their way to a large, busy office near the emergency department. Most of the bots here were miners, either by frametype or occupation. Most of the conversation in the room was shop talk, chiefly about whatever jobsite accident landed them here. And, except for Dragonfly and a youngling who had discovered at 200 mph that boulders were just as hard on Mars as anywhere else, that seemed to be the prevailing back story.

An old femme sat carefully away from the back of the long bench which was ubiquitous waiting room furniture in bot areas. She had a large dent on her back, and her backstrut made a disconcerting squeaking noise every time she moved—which she did as infrequently as possible. "What happened to you, youngling?"

"Er...scraplets."

"You're off the _Chicago, _right? I heard about that! What happened?"

"They made a mess of my main wing strut. I'd just finished my growth cycle, so it wasn't at full strength yet. They couldn't fix it at the Pluto outpost so they sent me here."

"This guy's good. He's _Pride, _and my clan, Standfast, is a sept of _Abundance, _but don't hold that against him. He really knows what he's doing."

"That's good to know! You've got quite a dent there."

She said, "Yeah, I made a big mistake—never turn your back on a new journeyman, like _this_ glitch, who's setting off explosives without bothering to yell 'fire in the hole!'" She said that with a grin, and the fields of the young mech next to her flared with embarrassment. She softened the rebuke with a pat on the shoulder.

Dragonfly was soon ushered into a bay. Her wing was numbed and the armor removed so that a miner even older than the femme in the waiting room could examine her wing strut. "Hmm. I think Dr. Vance and the team at the Pluto outpost have done all the welding that will be any help. What we need to do is speed up integrating the repairs. Temporary boost to the nanites, and some energon supplements for them, should do the trick."

"How long will it take?"

"Ten, twelve joor. I'm going to give you an energon supplement. Tastes nasty, but make sure you take it. The nanites need the extra nourishment to work."

She couldn't fly back to the _Chicago_, but she would fly again. Through the immediate disappointment, her fuel pump sang with that knowledge.

A human receptionist showed Vance and Whitefire into Smokescreen's office. A patterned paneling on the walls and ceilings absorbed sound, and indirect lighting chased the shadows without creating glare.

The furniture was the simple, almost minimalist style preferred by most bots: Smokescreen's desk and chair, a bookcase loaded with data pads that served both as filing cabinet and display space for a large ivy plant. The room had a window, and a collection of crystals on the windowsill caught the Martian sunlight. There were several comfortable chairs, including human-sized ones on the desk—a ramp built around the desk made it easy for humans to get up and down without having to wait for a bot to give them a lift.

Smokescreen himself was a Praxian doorwinger, mostly blue-gray in color with red accents and a yellow chevron over curious azure optics. "Welcome. I'm Smokescreen."

"Stephanie Vance, Major, EDF. I'm the CMO of the _Chicago. _This is my apprentice, Whitefire of Mars Base."

The healer nodded to each of them in turn. He was used to being subtly threatened by new patients' cohort, though in the case of the rough-and-tumble miners the subtlety was mostly noticeable by its absence. This, though, was the first time he'd been politely reminded that if he stepped one ped out of line, a ship of the line would park itself on his aft.

He put that aside. His preferred mode of conduct made it immaterial, and he was by Primus going to keep it that way.

Smokescreen made a gesture to the chairs, and they sat. "Apprentice Whitefire, would you prefer to have your Craftmaster stay for the initial consult?"

"If you wouldn't mind, Healer, yes, I would."

"Not at all. I'm here to help you. We'll do whatever furthers that goal." He turned to Vance. "I fear that most of this exchange must be carried out in our native language. I will provide a datapad with the transcription of this session on it if you wish, or Whitefire can, of course, tell you what she wishes to share. A third alternative is a translating earpiece. My receptionist can fit you with one."

Vance loathed earpieces of any kind, translating or not. But this wasn't about her. "Whitefire, which would you prefer?"

Whitefire said thoughtfully, "I don't think I want this on a datapad."

"Okay. Shall I wear the earpiece, then?"

"Yes please."

In the reception area, the woman who had shown them in pointed a device at Vance's ear, "shot" her, and a drawer underneath the ivy popped open. The receptionist retrieved a tiny device, inserted it into a sleeve, and put the whole thing into Vance's ear.

Smokescreen made a noise her other ear recorded as "screech-crunch," but the device said smoothly, "Is that working for you, Healer Vance?"

"Yes," she said, startled. "It is."

They returned to the office. Whitefire said, "Thank you, Healer," to one, or perhaps both, of them.

"Could you describe the problem for me?" Smokescreen had seen the reports, but he always learned more from his patient's firsthand account. A "problem" was usually a collection of things, and it helped to know which aspects the patient found affected them most.

There was a very long, troubled silence. And then Whitefire said reluctantly, "We recovered remains from a station, and they were contaminated with scraplets. While I was locating the identity file for that bot, one got loose. I didn't realize it had gotten into my armor." She fell silent again, and stayed that way.

After a time, Smokescreen said calmly, "That's really everybot's horror-fear, isn't it? Scraplets are a nightmare. I wonder we haven't found a way to eradicate them, the way humans" – he nodded to Vance – "have smallpox."

This calm, rational comment went a long way toward reassuring his patient, as it was meant to.

Whitefire nodded, but replied, "We can't kill them till we find them, and right now we have no reliable way to do that. They could be anywhere...anywhere the temperature is low enough to reduce their energy requirements to almost nil. On derelict orbital stations, like the jump point where we found these—for that matter, there are even suitable conditions on some planets. They'll be out there...waiting...for megavorns before they finally all deactivate."

Smokescreen learned more from the tremors in the bot's vocalization, and the choice of glyphs she transmitted, than from her vocalized speech. The end of the war was supposed to be the end of the violence, but as long as there were stasis-locked scraplets out there waiting for unsuspecting mecha to stumble across them, it would never truly stop.

Humans, he thought, often stepped on old landmines, the legacy of past conflicts.

That knowledge frightened Smokescreen's patient, but did not panic her. By all reports, she had reacted quite calmly during the emergency itself. Her attempted suicide had been days later, after a joor spent in recharge.

The auditor began to form a theory. "Undoubtedly we've learned a great deal from this incident, things that will help us prevent such infestations. Simply making sure that anything taken from an area where scraplets might be found remains below the temperature which could online them until it has been thoroughly inspected would negate the risk, wouldn't it?"

Whitefire said, "Yes, it would."

"Therefore, isn't it highly unlikely that you will ever go through this again?"

Coolant sheeted across her optics, and she shuttered them rapidly to remove it. "Yes. I know that's logical."

"Whitefire, what happened that morning when you were found almost without charge in your systems?"

"I had a memory flux. It wouldn't stop. I couldn't break out of it, and there was no one..."

"You have no cohort?"

"No. My mother died in a raid; we were the last. I wanted to be a healer, but Fixer already had four apprentices. I started classes here at the science dome, and then right after my adult upgrades, I apprenticed to Dr. Vance. I share quarters with two other bots, and we get along all right, but we don't work in the same areas. Tripper is the Chief Engineer's apprentice, and BS is a gunner's mate. We don't know each other well enough to form a cohort, and even if we did, people get reassigned all over the fleet all the time. It just wouldn't be a good idea, when we probably won't be serving together very long."

"You introduced yourself as 'of Mars Base.' What clan were you sparked into?"

"_Pride._ But I won't be going back there, will I?"

He chose not to answer her question. "I see. Why did you shut off your generator, Whitefire?"

"Every time the flux repeated, it was...more intense. I was terrified. At first I tried to tell myself that someone would find me. But I couldn't...make it stop. I don't remember actually turning off my generator. I believe that I did, since nothing else makes any sense. But I did not log doing it."

"I believe that what you experienced may have been a very specific type of glitch known as a memory loop."

"I haven't dared to recharge since," she admitted. "I've been topping off my batteries from the ship's power grid."

"That's harmless, for the length of time that you've been doing it."

"What caused it? What happened to me?"

"A very tiny section of corrupted code. Once that memory crops up in a flux, this is exactly what happens—it repeats itself continually, until someone initiates a reset. Most of the time, the memory which glitches is relatively innocuous, and most of the time, another bot will realize that someone has glitched and get help. You had the very bad luck of getting stuck in a traumatic memory while you were alone." He paused. "And that's all it was, Whitefire. Bad luck, in concatenating circumstances."

"Will it happen again?"

"It's my job to see that it doesn't," he replied.

"You'll have to rewrite it, won't you?"

"That's one method," he replied quietly. "Many bots prefer to correct the problem themselves, via a guided defragmentation. Afterward, I recommend writing the troublesome memory to external storage and deleting your local copy."

"What—but I—you aren't supposed to delete memory files!" she exclaimed, scandalized.

Smokescreen had expected that reaction. "What possible need could you have for that memory in the few clicks it would take to access external storage? You won't "lose" it if you replace it with a summary of its contents and the location of the original file. Once you've cleaned up the glitch, you could save it off and donate it to the medical archives. In that way, someone may make good use of it in developing code to make this less likely to happen, and a backup to your external drive will exist, if you ever need it for anything. And you will have the peace of mind of knowing that you can never get caught in that loop again."

"Is this something that could happen again, with a different memory?"

"It isn't likely. You were in a tremendously stressful situation. Memory glitches aren't uncommon at times like that. Usually they take the form of dropped or garbled data, but getting shuffled off into a loop, what happened to you, is not unheard of. Whatever form they take, almost invariably, they are isolated incidents."

He could read in her fields that the young healer nerved herself up to say, "What do I have to do?"

He smiled at her. "Give me permission to begin guided defragmentation, or to rewrite the memory. You may remain conscious while I do that, if you wish. I've had patients tell me that it's not unpleasant, but not something they want to do on a daily basis."

"If we do a guided defragmentation, can we start now?"

"I need to block in a longer period of time for you. You're here for four standard rotations, isn't that correct?" He looked to Vance.

"That's right."

He accessed his booking data. "I have a triple block open later today. We could do it then, if you wished. Or I have enough time to go in, download the memory, and rewrite it right now. Your choice. If you choose the rewrite, I suggest you spend at least part of your time at Mars Base in deep defragmentation." Smokescreen looked up at her, and smiled. "Either way, you'll be going back to the _Chicago _with everyone else."

Whitefire said, "Set me up for the appointment later today, please. I'd rather learn how to do this right while I have the chance."

That was a diplomatic way to put it that she'd rather do it herself to make sure it was done properly, but Smokescreen expected nothing less of someone sparked a miner. A lot of bots wanted to be safely in stasis the whole time, and did not want to wake up until it was over. Not miners.

He set up the appointment. "I'll see you thirty klicks into the third joor, then."

"Thank you, Healer Smokescreen."

He nodded politely. "Apprentice. Craftmaster."

They left. Smokescreen logged the interview. Whitefire would be all right, he was sure—once she went through the defragmentation procedure and understood how unlikely it was that her horrible experience would ever repeat itself, she would put it behind her.

The humans she worked with were likely to be a different story. The difficult part of this case was going to be to convince her human captain and Craftmaster that her suicide attempt had been an act of desperation, not despair, and no wonder—Soundwave had been notorious for using memory loops as a very effective form of torture. Smokescreen had helped sort out a few bots who'd had that done to them, and quite frankly the idea of being trapped in such a loop scared him worse than scraplets did. He suspected that in Whitefire's place he would still have been a screaming mess, not an outpatient.

Miners were tough people. She had panicked in an untenable situation that she had no idea how to handle, but nearly anyone else would have done the same.

He sighed, and set Whitefire to one side for now. He had to get ready for his next patient.

Once Dragonfly's healer had let her go, with instructions to wait four days before flying—she could fly again in four days!—the cadets hurried to enjoy the diversions on offer.

They stopped near the entrance to the tunnel leading to the main dome. Shaker asked, "What do you want to do now?"

"We could see a movie," Dragonfly suggested.

"I want to get a good wash and wax," Star said. "I'm so tired of shipboard showers I could scream!"

"No sense in getting clean just to get dirty again," Firecracker objected. "Let's go kick up some dust first, then hit the washracks, and go out on the concourse after that!"

The cheapest fun to be had near Mars Base also one of the most popular activities. Not too far from the base, the road gave way to a wide expanse of red plain, which was a great place to race. It had been made even better after several different tracks had been cleared of rocks and timing stations had been set up around them. Businesses had also grown up around the pits—a lounge where humans could get out of their space suits and watch the races, a couple of energon restaurants, a painter who catered to racing enthusiasts, a small urgent care center where serious injuries could be stabilized for transport to the hospital, and the much more frequent minor dents and dings treated.

John and Anna stayed with Dragonfly, who got her damaged paint touched up while the rest hit the tracks for a couple of hours. Like all seekers, she was fussy about her paint, especially that on her wings—scratches created tiny differences in air pressure when flying in atmosphere or even just walking around, and Dragonfly thought the sensation must be similar to what humans called an itch. It was a relief to get that taken care of. She wouldn't be able to soak in a solvent pool later with new paint, but there were other relaxing things to do in the spa.

Being confined on shipboard got real old, real fast, for bots meant to move. Skyrocket was challenged to a race by a flier who had the Ohio State University mascot, Brutus the Buckeye, painted on his wings. The two of them took off.

Firecracker and Earthshaker joined a crowd of tracked mecha who were having a pulling contest. Star gravitated to a group of bots closer to her size and frame type who taking turns at one of the drag strips. A line had formed in front of a minibot who was organizing things, matching up racers with similar opponents. There was a minimal charge for use of the course and the services of the starter, another minibot. The pair made their money from the concession stand. Running flat out in a drag race used a lot of energon.

Star had a good run against a small black and red femme with a speedy Cybertronian alt form. Star lost the race by a slim margin, but that didn't stop it from being fun. She went back to the line to get another race.

"Nightstar! Hello!"

She turned and grinned when she recognized the battered miner with the fresh welds on his back plates. "Lodestone, hi! They didn't keep you in the hospital? That's great!"

"No, they just said I'll be sore for a few days, and I'm not allowed to go back to work yet. We were lucky—very lucky you and your partner got to us when you did."

Jordan limped up on crutches, his cast strapped over the lower leg of his suit. "Hey! Nightstar!"

She grinned. "How are you, Jordan?"

"It's a clean break. The healer says it'll take at least ten weeks to heal. But it isn't that bad in low-gee. And I'm not complaining anyhow."

"I hope it doesn't hurt that much."

"Well, they gave me some pills. I took one this morning."

The minibot shouted Star's name. Lodestone said, "You're up!"

Laughing, she ran to take her place, transforming to alt mode at the starting line.

Her opponent, a black SUV with red optics and a crude patch where his Decepticon brand once was, revved in anticipation. "Ready to eat dust, sweetspark?"

"Oh, that's it—you're going down!"

"Put your money where your mouth is?"

"Twenty says I can."

"You're on."

The Christmas tree lit up. The instant the green light came on, both of them roared off the starting line. They both lost traction in the dust, but then their tires bit and they were off. The minibots were doing a good job of matching up opponents. He had more power, but he was also heavier; it balanced out. Both of them roared down the track flat-out. Star hadn't realized how much she missed being able to do that until she'd been aboard ship for weeks.

She heard Lodestone cheering her on, and pushed herself just a little harder—crossing the finish line a bumper's width ahead of her opponent.

He paid her winnings into her account, with his congratulations. "Want to get some energon?"

"Thanks, but I'm here with some friends," Star replied. "I'll be here for a few days, though, so maybe we'll run into each other again."

He nodded, thanked her for a good race, and went back to the starting area to sign up for another run.

She chatted with Lodestone for a little while, then lost another run—and the twenty credits—to a fast little cycleformer.

Jordan, saying nothing, had begun to limp. Lodestone said, "Hey, what's up? Let's get you to urgent care."

"It's not that big a deal," Jordan said.

"Yeah, it is. Come on, o limping one, let's get it looked at. I don't want a lame partner."

"Geez, wish I'd thought of that."

Lodestone buffeted him on the shoulder, and they went to urgent care. A bot trained in human medicine scanned him and told him it was fine, just fatigued, and to rest it for a while. They picked up Anna from the lounge.

Star commed Shaker, ::Anna and I met Lodestone and Jordan. We're going back up to the main dome.::

::Ya meetin' us at the bath house later?::

::Maybe. Don't worry about us if we aren't there.::

::OK, have fun.::

Whitefire told Vance, "You don't have to come in with me. There won't be anything to see."

"Unless you'd rather I stay in the waiting room, I said I'd be there, and I will."

"Thanks."

The receptionist looked up form her desk and said, "Apprentice Whitefire, the Healer will see you now."

When they went inside, the chairs had been rearranged to allow Smokescreen and Whitefire to sit facing each other with a narrow table between them. Whitefire had seen pictures of pre-war healer's offices on old Cybertron and they all had those little tables, keeping the healer outside a figurative partition from the (usually higher-caste) patient. In Dr. Vance's medbay, none of the bot healers had ever done anything other than park beside the berth or simply sit on the edge of it when treatment required a hardline. She hadn't thought before about what an expression of trust that was, until meeting Smokescreen and finding herself in a situation where trustworthiness was not assumed.

"Whitefire, are you certain that you want to be awake for this? It's like any other defragmentation procedure. Once we start, if we stop in the middle you'll find your file system in a more fragmented condition than it is right now. But rest assured that, if you do need to stop, you can stop at any time. I'll be watching and guiding, but you'll be in full control at all times. It is illegal for me to intervene at any time, for _any_ reason, unless you specifically ask me to do so."

"I understand. I am requesting that you inform me if I am about to do anything that will result in irreparable harm without your assistance, so that I may make fully informed choices." Whitefire made a careful selection of both the Cybertronian glyphs and the English medico-legalese, so that there wouldn't be any AI-translation problems where Vance was concerned.

She knew that Smokescreen knew this was a situation where a misstep could turn into a matter of honor in a sparkbeat. Best to prevent that.

"I shall," he promised. The glyph transmitted precisely illustrated the difference between the English "shall" and "will." It is a matter of honor, and therefore I make an effort whenever a choice point presents itself.

Her fields ordered themselves, calm, steady, fear there but pushed aside by competence. She had a job to do.

As soon as he hardlined to Whitefire and she let down her firewalls, he realized why: good fences make good neighbors, as the human poet said.

Behind one specific firewall, the apprentice was transmitting a log of whatever they did to Vance's deck. Vance's very secure, high-level military deck. Now it went without saying that he could break that firewall—but it would take him time to do it, and as soon as the black ice on that military deck was triggered by an intrusion, the entire fleet would know about it.

Whitefire had been careful to send her instructions in both languages, not only so that he and Vance would understand exactly what she was giving him permission to do...but also to set parameters for whatever security that deck had running.

And while he was dealing with that—or trying to, he knew very well what kind of nastiness a military deck could contain—Whitefire would have plenty of time to transform to her digger alt.

Oh, he might be able to fill the room with a cloud of disruptor particles before she could grind him to bits, and before that deck could deliver its payload—maybe—but even if he did, he wasn't going to escape a base full of her shipmates, who would be alerted by hacking that deck.

Checkmate. Before either side moved a piece. He transmitted a glyph that would have translated in English to "Whoa!" ::Are you sure you're going into medical instead of command?::

::We cross-train pretty extensively,:: she replied. ::Ironhide once told us that the best victory is the one you win before you have to fire a shot. As a medic, I like that philosophy better than some of the others I've heard from him.::

::The next time an EDF officer challenges me to a game of strateka, I intend to take him up on it. I could learn a lot.::

He showed her how to begin the defrag. Due to the location of the damaged file, it would be a little while before they reached it. Once everything was in operation, she replied, ::Craftmaster Crystallia enjoys a good game.::

Strateka, called cyberchess in English, was a common pastime in the Fleet, along with the human version. The Cybertronian version differed from the human in that there were six sets of pieces, named after the six major city-states, and each had different strengths and weaknesses. Any set could defeat any other, but some combinations were more difficult than others. Every player had a favorite set, but the lower-ranked player chose first, so more experienced players often ended up playing their second-favorite set. It was a great deal like some card-based role-playing games.

For Smokescreen, though, the attraction was not strateka alone. He chose not to admit even to himself that he often enjoyed the side bets on a good game as much as the game itself.

The next few breems were among the most tedious of a bot's life. Many chose to drowse through it, as nothing could be written while the defragmentation was active without slowing it down. Whitefire did so only until enough memory was clear to allow her to actively monitor.

Everything went routinely until the defragmentation program threw an alert for a bad sector. A lot of bots panicked the first time that happened. Whitefire just said, "Well, that's interesting," and mapped the location. She said, "I'd like to know what's on that sector, but I'm afraid if it's the glitched memory, I'll get stuck in the loop again. What's the best way to avoid that?"

"Write the contents of that sector to a clear sector."

She did so. "Lock out the damaged sector now?"

"Yes, but not permanently. You'll want to know what damaged it in the first place, and you may need to access it again in order to do that."

Once that was accomplished, he guided her through analyzing the contents of the sector. She had the programming to do that in her healer's upgrades, but her training had not yet progressed that far.

The results made them both scowl. The sector contained nothing but a data log from a routine maintenance check of her hydraulic system—a check which had shown everything as nominal. The log had been transmitted to her medical records then deleted—it was merely a scrap of old data which had yet to be overwritten.

If it had contained the glitched memory, Whitefire and Smokescreen could have almost certainly regarded the problem as solved. Instead, the contents of this sector might be evidence of a more serious problem. It might also simply be a bad memory sector; every memory unit had a few. Most were discovered and locked out when a sparkling first came online, and never presented a problem for the rest of the bot's life. Some went bad later, and were discovered in defragmentation just as this one had been. Then they found three more, in physically contiguous sectors. In two of them, the data contained was irretrievable. The apprentice growled, ::I hope they both belong to the same Pit-be-damn' file, otherwise I have at least two glitched files and maybe three.::

::Whitefire, may I consult privately with Dr. Vance? I would like to rule something in or out. If it's nothing, you're probably better off not worrying about it right now.::

::Yes, you may.:: If he didn't tell her, after all, once the situation was under control, Vance would.

He sent a message to Vance's deck rather than speaking aloud. _"Doctor Vance, did a scraplet get into Whitefire's cranium?"_

She shot a look at Whitefire's back, then typed, _"Yes, is there a problem?"_

_"Bad sectors. I suspect physical damage to one of her drives. Is this possible?"_

_"Anything's possible. There was no gross damage to the drive units, though—not according to any of the instruments available to me on the _Chicago."

_"That's good news. Any damage which does exist will be extremely limited."_

He turned his attention back to the presence at the other end of the hardline. ::Whitefire, we suspect that a scraplet may have done some minor damage to one of your drives. I emphasize _minor_ damage, as your scans aboard the _Chicago_ came up clear.::

For just a moment, he was afraid she was going to reboot. But then she said, ::Could be worse. My backups were up to date at the time of the outbreak.::

He couldn't quite suppress the glyphs for respect and admiration. He had seen his share of combat, that was true, and he was proud of his service. But he was a civilian medic who had done his bit, and then happily mustered out at the end of the war.

He caught a faint amusement. ::The two worst things that could happen to me already did, and I'm still here,:: she pointed out, with eminent practicality. ::If this is the only problem we find—please, Primus, let this be the only problem we find!—it won't be hard to fix.::

::No. Once your defrag is finished and the bad sectors have all been locked out, all you have to do is slot in a new drive, copy the data to it except that one file, and as soon as the copy's confirmed, problem solved. If you wish, you can lock out the old drive and leave it in place until you need the slot. You should have plenty of memory for a few hundred vorns.::

Only explorers who collected massive amounts of data, and science bots whose duties involved running large, complicated simulations on a regular basis, tended to fill up their slots and needed to be modified for more onboard memory than that. Whitefire didn't expect to.

::You wouldn't happen to have extra drives for sale?::

::No, I don't sell them because I don't want anyone to think I'm trying to sell them something.::

::Oh! That makes sense! I'm sorry.::

::No offense taken. I'll write you a script that you can get filled at the hospital pharmacy, or any of the parts supplies in the marketplace. They're all reputable, so choose the one you find most trustworthy.::

Fifteen klicks later, they found the glitched memory. Whitefire sent a safety code to Vance's deck so there wouldn't be any misunderstandings, then turned control over to Smokescreen. She was trembling and her fans kicked on to prevent her from overheating from anxiety.

Smokescreen created a partition for her, eliminated the glitch that had caused the memory loop, then locked the now-safe memory behind the partition. He gave Whitefire the key code to the partition. ::Whitefire. You are perfectly safe now. You have complete control of that memory. You could leave it behind the partition, and never access it again. You could move it to external storage, or donate it to the hospital here, then delete it. Or you could access it as a document, and view it as if it were someone else's memory. You are completely in control of it now, not the other way around.::

::Thank you, Healer Smokescreen.:: Smokescreen relaxed; the beating of the "You have complete control" drum had been successful.

Whitefire realized that Vance had reached up to hold her servo. She closed her digits just enough to acknowledge her craftmaster and mentor's presence, then let the defragmentation continue to run. For the first time since the scraplets had been spotted, she felt safe.

(Continued in Chapter 5 Part 2)


	6. New Horizons, Part 2

Chapter 5 – New Horizons, Part 2

Disclaimers in Chapter 1

Like the Roman bath or the Japanese onsen on Earth, a central feature of any Cybertronian settlement of any permanence whatsoever was the public washrack. It was a place to gather, soak in solvent, share gossip and energon, and have a spare servo available to scrub grit from hard-to-reach places. Most washracks consisted of an area where one removed most of the grit and grime, a solvent pool for leisurely soaks, and an energon bar.

The bots who had constructed such a facility on Marsbase had the foresight to include a public bath for humans as well, with hot and cold pools, showers, various steam rooms, and dry saunas, as well as areas for exposing oneself to broad-spectrum lighting—a necessity for humans to produce natural vitamin D and to avoid certain forms of depression, as well as to allow Cybertronians to relax and recharge in concentrated sunlight which was much stronger than on the planet's surface. A restaurant which served both alcohol and traditionally "healthy" spa food, depending on the client's preferences, was now one of the bath's amenities. The owners also found that some humans preferred exercise equipment to be available near such places, while other humans enjoyed such services as hair styling and massage therapy, and human specialists in those fields had soon joined the staff of bots whose job was to touch up paint scratches and apply various waxes and polishes.

Had these canny business-bots not plowed most of their profits back into their business, they would have been some of the wealthiest individuals on Marsbase.

Anna, Star, Jordan and Lodestone paid to get in. Star had fresh paint, and Lodestone wasn't allowed to soak either, so they cleaned up in the washracks, careful what they got wet, and found a private nook to sunbathe. Star was aware of the rest of her cohort somewhere within the spa complex, but they weren't in the solarium. As she had her cohort blond dampened with the equivalent of a necktie on the doorknob, they didn't disturb her.

The only other customers in that area of the solarium were some human femmes—scientists—who had staked out a row of lounges and had a waiter bringing them a steady stream of umbrella drinks. A screen of potted palms offered both parties sufficient privacy, with the soft music masking distant conversations. The waiter took their orders, and presently returned with their energon, then left them to relax and enjoy.

Meanwhile, Anna and Jordan passed through the locker rooms and emerged in the pool area in complimentary robes and slippers. An attendant had carefully taped plastic wrap over Jordan's cast, so that he could enjoy the spa baths as long as he kept his leg out of the water. He hoped he had tipped the attendant enough.

A personal trainer saw them looking at the bewildering array of available services, and came over. "Hi, is this your first time here?"

"Yes, it is. I'm not even sure what all these things are..."

"May I ask about your injury?"

"Oh, er, mining accident. I broke my leg, cut it up pretty good while I was at it, and collected a lot of bruises."

"A massage probably wouldn't be very helpful if you have bruising. Does heat or cold help more?"

"Heat. I've been sleeping under an electric blanket and that helps."

"A lot of stiffness and soreness in addition to the leg injury?"

"Kinda, yeah."

"May I suggest a hot wrap?"

"What's that?"

"The therapist will wrap you in towels that have been wrung out in healing herbs. A lot of our miners swear by the moist heat, and then of course the steam from the herbal infusion is beneficial for your breathing. The treatment lasts an hour, and most people relax enough to fall asleep."

"Sounds great. Anna?"

"I think I'll do the ladies' special. We don't get much pampering aboard ship!" she laughed. "Maybe when we're finished we can join Star and Lodestone in the solarium and get something to eat?"

"OK, sure. Have fun."

Anna told the trainer, "Be careful with him. That's a bad break, the docs say he's been on it too much today."

"Don't worry, the hospital sends miners recovering from injuries down here all the time. Our therapists are fully qualified. Let's put you in room four, it's the closest. Are you allergic to any herbs?"

"Not that I know of."

While the two humans went their separate ways, Star and Lodestone were finishing their energon. Lodestone said, "That's good, but it isn't what we have in the clans. Have you ever had our energon?"

"Once, your high grade, that is; my dad had some. It was...different."

He laughed. "Surfacers have to get used to our high-grade! I meant, midgrade, like this. We put some of the same supplements in it that go into the high-grade, because we like the taste. It's sort of dark, I think it has a lot more flavor than surfacer energon but it doesn't have a mean kick like the high grade does."

"Mean kick? I thought that stuff was going to blow my processor out my audials! I was thirsty, and I didn't know you weren't supposed to take a big gulp of it! Mom and Dad laughed themselves silly."

Both of them laughed. "You're really close to your cohort, aren't you?"

"Yes. Both of them—I still have a bond with my parents' cohort even though I'm part of Shaker's cohort now."

"Oh, it's like that with the miners too. I'm cohort with six other independent miners who work claims near ours. We consider Jordan part of our cohort, as well as a couple of other humans, Sung-Tse and Min-Min, who work with Fire Opal most of the time. But I also have ties to my parents' cohort, and the cohort I was in as a youngling. All of us were apprenticed to Iridium."

"What was it like to grow up in the mining clans?"

"Well, you know what you're going to do for a living!" he laughed. "Nearly everyone born into a mining clan becomes a miner by trade. Even the ones who later also train as engineers or medics or whatever. We spend our sparkling years following our parents around and pretending to do whatever they're doing. We apprentice as soon as we're in our youngling frames, and start working soon after that. We need to—idle miners glitch. We don't go to school like surfacers. We used to sing the teaching songs as we worked, and the littles would learn by listening. I loved how the harmonies echoed in the tunnels. But then...there were no more sparklings for so long...we stopped singing after a while."

Star blinked coolant from her optics and reached across to put her servo over his. "There are new sparklings now, Lodestone. Why, my mother is with spark, I'll have a new little brother or sister when I get home to Diego! You'll hear those songs again, I promise."

He smiled and nodded. "We spend a lot of time alone when we're working, so when we're at the home forge, we take our energon together and spend all the time we can in the commons. Is it like that in your clan?"

"Oh, yes. Not everyone comes every evening, but there are always a lot of people in the commons. NEST, too. Of course, a lot of them are techno-organics now, but even before that, they were family. My clan is a warband, so that's probably a little different even now that we're at peace."

"You're clan to the Primes. I mean—we considered Elita clan, but she wasn't a Prime then."

"Dad says she should have been," Star replied.

"I think so too. She was always wise. She never told the captains what to do—but I don't think she had to. They always came to her before they decided anything important. But no matter how busy she was, she always had time for us younglings."

"Will you stay here with your clan?"

"No, I don't think so...it's been good to be with my family again, but, Star, we hit the mother lode. I don't think Jordan wants to be an independent anymore, no more than I do for that matter, but we'll have enough money once we mine out that rock to set ourselves up doing whatever we want. You can bet we'll be more careful from now on, though."

"I believe that! What do you think you'll do?"

"Well, I've been talking to my parents, and they think we should start a trading post. No one likes having to travel all the way to Mars Base for every little thing."

"Oh! That's a great idea! Once you mine out your claim and stabilize that asteroid to stop the quakes, it's big enough to build a good-sized settlement on."

"I think so. And it's small enough to mount drives to it if we want to move it later, as the mining operations migrate to other parts of the asteroid belt. But we won't have to worry about that for megavorn."

"Lodestone, how long will it take to get all the ore out of that asteroid?"

"A few months. Our whole cohort is going to work on it together, and we're going to get a mining engineer to check it out completely before we start." He shuddered, rattling his plating a little. "One cave in was enough!"

"I'm glad to hear that. I was worried about you going back there."

"You were?" he said, optics brightening. "I—I mean, thanks. I appreciate that." He turned his empty energon cube in his servo. "Um—what about you? What will you do now?"

"After we graduate from the Academy, we'll get our assignments. We're hoping for the Fleet, of course, if we score high enough. It would be great if we could stay aboard the _Chicago_. She can use the bots, and our seekers help round out her flight wing. But it all depends. As a cohort we'll be assigned together, so we'll go wherever the person who scores the lowest is assigned."

"I can't imagine that any of you will score that low. You and Anna were really professional getting Jordan and me out of the hole."

"I hope you're right. But the Academy is really tough academically. Our cadet cruise is only part of our final score. The Fleet only wants the best of the best."

"But Anna's mom is the headmistress, right?"

"Commandant, yes, and you bet she made sure we kept our grades up. I don't like to think about what she would have done if she'd caught us slacking off! But she didn't give us any more help than she gave any of the other cadets. We had to earn every merit we got."

"You know, I can really respect both what she did, and what you did. Excelling at your job, that's the way we miners are too. Nothing makes us feel better than knowing we did that."

"Yeah, you have to be. You can't afford to make mistakes."

"It's always been dangerous work, but we kept Cybertron going through the Golden Age," he replied. "So, yeah, I understand why you'd want to serve in the Fleet. You have to be the best at what you do to get there."

She nodded. For Annabelle, only fourteen at the time of the Battle of Virginia, less than the best would never be enough; had her cohort caught that attitude from her? Star wanted to believe that they would all have arrived there anyway, but it no longer mattered. Less than the best wasn't good enough for any of them, now.

Star stretched, exposing more of her solar receptors. The warmth was delicious, almost as good as basking on the beach back home. "This is so nice."

"When we get our dome, I want to put in more concentrating mirrors than we actually need for energon, so we can have a sunroom. And not just to lie around in, Jordan needs fresh vegetables, right?"

"Right!" she laughed.

An attendant came over. "I'm sorry, but the sprinklers are going to come on in fifteen minutes to water the plants. If you don't want to get wet, you'll need to vacate this area."

"Thanks! Where else could we go?"

"Have you seen our crystal gardens yet? The crystals have only been growing for a year, so they aren't huge yet, but people do like to walk around there."

"That sounds nice."

"The entrance is just to your right. Would you like more energon to take with you?"

Star said, "None for me, thanks, I had some at the race track."

"I'm good. Thanks."

They followed the attendant's direction to the crystal gardens. Growing these crystals had been a pastime on Cybertron-that-was, and before the war, most cities had such a garden. Those most spectacular had been in Crystal City and Vos.

Neither of them was old enough to have seen those in anything except the few vids which remained, all that was left of them.

None of these crystals were more than ankle high. They were laid out in beds like a human flower garden, and the sunlight was precisely focused to bring each to life. Star vented softly. "Oh, this is lovely."

Lodestone thought that none of the crystals matched Nightstar's optics for brilliance and clarity. It was too soon, but one joor, when the time was right, he would tell her so.

The rest of the cadets splashed in the pools for a while, then relaxed while they had a drink—Skyrocket and Firecracker insisted on high-grade, and Dragonfly was excited enough about the end of being grounded that she went along with it. After a couple of shots, they decided they wanted to do something else, so Shaker pinged Star to let her know they were leaving, and they went back up to the concourse.

By now the business day had ended, and the crowd consisted of people out to spend money rather than make some. They stopped in a club to listen to some interesting music for a while, then continued along the concourse, most of them the worse for wear.

Skyrocket's attention was attracted by something down a side corridor. "The Lobbster?"

The English word was a pun, a play on the name of a favorite tough-mech Cybertronian sport. Lobbing involved two big, burly mechs playing catch with a heavy metal "lob," at least half the smaller contestant's weight. And damn'd be him that first cries, "Hold, enough!"

Dragonfly said, "I don't know, aren't those miner bars off limits?"

Shaker checked the list. "That one isn't, but still..."

Firecracker said, "Aw, c'mon, Shaker, don't you want to watch lobbing? We don't have to stay."

Against his better judgment, because Skyrocket also wanted to go, Shaker agreed.

Experience, he would shortly find, is the best teacher.

They entered the bar, which was minimally furnished in the miner style—mostly open space with benches around the edges, and a bar along one wall. Human tables were set far back under the benches, where they were safe from a badly aimed lob. The clientele, both mecha and humans, were nearly all miners.

Two mecha were out in the center of the floor. One of them hefted the lob, and with a groan of strained metal and threw it to his opponent. That mech caught it, and the impact knocked him on his skidplate, but he held onto the lob at the cost of some impressive dents. A loud round of applause and stomping went up from the crowd, and several wagers were settled.

The "catcher" got to his peds, then picked up the lob and flung it with all his might. It laid his opponent out flat, and he lay there, groaning. Some helpful friends got the lob off him, but he didn't try to get up right away.

The barkeeper came over and checked on him, then called the match. There was some discussion concerning whether he'd hit the back of his helm on the floor, but the consensus was that he hadn't. Another round of cheers and settling of bets took place, while the winner helped the loser up and treated him to a round.

A none-too-steady miner came over to Shaker. "Want to try your luck?"

Shaker said diplomatically, "I don't know, you guys are pretty good."

"Aw, c'mon, youngling—give it a shot! Honor o' the Fleet, eh?"

Everyone was looking at him, and he found that he had no intention of backing down in front of Dragonfly.

The bartender said, "House rules are, stay back of your own line, don't lob if there's anyone out on the floor, and don't hit my bar! Winner takes ten percent of the bets, and buys the loser a drink, t' be sportin' about it!"

In fact, several of the mecha in the bar were paying the winner of the previous round his cut.

Shaker took his place behind the line, while the challenger staggered into place. Shaker thought he'd figured out that bot's strategy—win or lose, he ended up with his next round, and either way, the crowd paid for it.

The cadet got the first lob. He lifted it, spun a couple of times to build momentum, then let fly.

The miner caught it and staggered back a couple of steps, but held onto it and kept his feet. Once he got his balance, he scanned around to be sure no one had staggered out onto the playing floor, then wound up for his own lob. Shaker braced himself to catch several tons of metal, his mass and solid build working in his favor. He was slightly heavier than the other bot—and knew how to use his center of gravity to keep his balance. A cheer went up, while side bets on that round were settled.

He didn't have the necessary experience with the sport to best a more seasoned opponent, though. The next time, the miner put some spin on the lob, and when Shaker caught it, he was spun just enough sideways to lose his balance and land on his back, with the lob on top of him.

To his chagrin, he couldn't get arranged to shove it off himself and get up – the mass was just a bit high, far enough from his center of gravity to pin him.

He shared in the good-natured laughter. His opponent and Firecracker moved it, and he accepted the miner's friendly servo. "Not bad for a beginner, kid! Gotta watch for that spin on the lob."

"I'll remember that!" Shaker grinned.

They went to the bar so the winner could collect his cut of the bets and buy a round. Shaker drank it at his leisure, while Firecracker and Skyrocket had to have a go. There was a little discussion over that: the miners who were sober enough not to have taken leave of their common sense were hesitant to go against a youngling seeker. Seekers were lighter, less well-armored, and had relatively fragile wings. There was a dent puller at the end of the bar, but it was as much for show as actual use—no one was meant to get seriously hurt. Finally, the bartender decided that Skyrocket would be safe enough matched against the miner younglings.

A good time was had by all. Shaker and Dragonfly slowed way down on the high-grade, but Firecracker and Skyrocket were enjoying themselves a little too much. It all seemed harmless, until Firecracker staggered while winding up and the lob slipped out of his hands. He didn't exactly throw it. The ball of metal only went about three meters before it hit the floor and rolled toward the bar. Before anyone could intercept it, the unguided missile rolled into the back of a mech's legs just as he was getting ready to down a generous slug from his cube. The black liquid missed his gullet and spilled all over him.

He slammed the cube on the bar and rounded on the equally inebriated cadet, roaring something in such slurred miner's dialect that the cadets had no hope of translating. His roundhouse swing probably would have flattened Firecracker if it had hit, but it was far enough off the mark that the kid was able to dodge both of the fisted servos that he saw coming at him.

"Hey, mech, ain't fair growin' more servos!" He threw an equally enthusiastic but dismally aimed punch.

"Why not, ye got a' extra pair o' yer own!"

Skyrocket howled with laughter, Dragonfly face-palmed, and Shaker sighed and got up to break it up.

Not wanting their entertainment ended so soon, a miner took a punch at Earthshaker.

That cleared the benches. No one much cared who started it or who was on which side, a friendly brawl among miners was a great way to spend the evening.

There's an old Earth saying that it's all good till someone loses an eye, and John Parker nearly lost more than that. Some miner with a pickled processor got the idea that, though he couldn't quite punch the nimble Dragonfly—who was only trying not to get hurt again, not join in the mayhem—he might be able to tag her if he used something with a larger area than his fist—like a bar stool. She yelped and dodged, and the heavy stool bounced under the bench toward John and a couple of human miners—who had been sensibly staying out of the way and betting on the outcome.

Firecracker did the only thing he could when he realized the stool was going to fragment when it hit: transformed to his alt form and used his dozer blade to protect the humans from the flying metal.

A piece of it bounced off the bar and slammed into his side, right into a transformation seam that hadn't had time to completely seal. He yelled in surprised pain as the transformation sequence aborted midway with a horrible grinding noise.

The bouncer and the bartender broadcast a series of no-nonsense glyphs that ended the fight in mid-swing.

Shaker and Dragonfly ran to Firecracker, who was lying on the ground trying not to moan out loud.

One of the bar stool legs was jammed right up against his t-cog. He was mostly transformed to his front end loader alt, which stymied anyone else who thought to offer first aid—neither the bartender nor the bouncer knew much about the anatomy of other bots besides miners—much less how that anatomy was affected by transformation to an alt neither of them had ever seen before.

While Dragonfly kept him calm and still, Shaker carefully determined how the metal bar had situated itself. It had to come out, fast, and the exact same way it had gone in. He overlaid schematics of Firecracker's alt and root forms, stepping through the transformation sequence and figuring out how the bar stool leg had ended up exactly where it was.

He sent to Dragonfly, ::Get ready to lean on him, I need him not to move for a second and this is probably gonna hurt.::

She sent a worried confirmation, and on Shaker's signal, leaned her weight onto Firecracker's shoulders.

He bellowed as Shaker pulled up on an armor plate, giving just enough play to ease the foreign object free without any further contact to the injured mechling's internals. With a loud squeal of abused parts, the transformation sequence reversed itself. Firecracker lay there for a long moment, sore and miserable but essentially unhurt.

It was a closer call than any of them wanted, though.

And that was when the Shore Patrol arrived. A core group of personnel assigned to EDF-Mars Base augmented by temporarily assigned personnel from all ships in port with crew on liberty, their duty was to keep those on leave from getting out of hand—as well as to assist EDF personnel who did run afoul of the local law.

They were the end of the fun for the night. When Shaker saw Skyrocket casting an optic on the back door, he put a stop to that. They were in enough trouble. They were marched to the hospital to get checked out, and from there straight to the _Chicago's_ brig, where they spent the rest of their leave.

Dragonfly furled her wings and fell asleep on her berth in the brig. Shaker sulked in the corner in his alt form with John in his cab, since there were no human accommodations in the brig cell and no one was inclined to provide any for miscreants caught raising hell on leave. Given a clean bill of health and a hefty pain-suppression electromagnetic pulse by a sympathetic ER medic, Firecracker barely found a berth before he passed out.

Skyrocket might have actively regretted their lack of good judgment if his processor hadn't been pounding with a flood of error codes from his overcharged condition and the minor injuries from the fight. As it was, he summed it up with the age-old vow of drunks everywhere–"I will never again touch another drop"–and fell into blessed oblivion.

Oblivious to the rest of their cohort's shenanigans, because the cohort bond was damped with a virtual tie on the doorknob, Star and Anna spent a leisurely evening enjoying the spa's various amenities. Anna enjoyed a lo-o-o-o-ng soak, then got something done with her hair before the ship's barber got at it again, while Jordan had his treatment. Afterwards, they rejoined Star and Lodestone in the crystal gardens.

Anna watched the play of dozens of rainbows over stones artistically placed around a small bed of clear crystals, the tallest barely a meter high. "How big will they get?"

Star found an image and cast it on the walkway. "This was the crystal garden in Vos. The larger crystals are this kind. The largest ones were developed in zero gravity, they were over ten meters tall. These won't get that big because the gravity affects how they develop, but they'll get taller than any of us. It takes vorn, though."

Anna said, "When we grew crystals in science class, we had to keep them in water. How does this work?"

"The crystals are surrounded by an energy field that does the same thing, carries the particles forming the crystal. There was no open water on Cybertron, remember, our ancestors first found natural crystals forming in places like around generators and developed this art form out of that."

Anna thought about an art form whose end product she would never see—unless she chose to become a techno-organic.

At the far end of the crystal gardens was an elevated patio restaurant with a view of the gardens. Star and Lodestone chose a spot near the railing, while Anna and Jordan discovered a tank that was growing some crystals the Earth way, suspended on glittering strings in a tank of liquid. These were protected from the sunlight, which would dull their brilliant colors.

They had large salads with some sort of textured protein strips that actually tasted pretty good, especially after the weeks of shipboard grub that Anna had been eating, and the beans, MREs, ramen noodles, and other packets of instant stuff that Jordan typically lived on when he was out on a claim.

Jordan said, "Y'know, we found crystals like this inside an asteroid one time. Do you know what a geode is?"

Anna nodded. "Wheeljack showed us some of them in science class."

"This whole asteroid was like that. We sold the whole thing to the geology department of a museum. It's orbiting the moon right now while their scientists study it. You know you work every day and it's just ordinary stuff, dig up a load and bring it in and sell it, and do the same thing again—and then, one day you find something like that. There are some amazing things out here. We don't have any idea what we might discover."

Anna nodded. "That's why I love what I do. Yeah, if there's trouble, we'll be here. But mostly, it isn't fighting, it's helping people and discovering new things."

"How long do you think it will be before there's another war?"

"There have always been people stupid and greedy enough to start them, all through everyone's history. Nobody knows if there are still Quintessons out there, or what their society is like now if there are. There were other species that the Cybertronians encountered during the height of the Golden Age, but contact's been lost for millenia now. Their civilizations could have fallen as well, or they could be just coming into Golden Ages of their own. We don't know. And on Earth—something could flare up there at any time, and we'd be pulled into it. A lot of things got put on the back burner when Galvatron attacked, but now those disputes are becoming active again. I hope if the diplomats do their job, I won't have to do mine. All we can do is stay as ready as we can, and hope that will discourage anyone who might get ideas."

Jordan nodded. "And rescue careless idiots in the meanwhile."

"I wouldn't say that. You had no reason to suspect that rock was unstable. I'm just glad we were there."

"There are going to be risks for a long time while we learn to live out here," Jordan said. "The alternative is, we stay on Earth and wait for the big asteroid to wipe us all out in one hit. But we should have done a better surveying job before we started digging. We guessed it was solid. We guessed wrong, we didn't know there were all those outgassing tubes weakening the structure."

"I'm glad you won't be doing that much longer," she said. "I know my job gets dangerous too, but I don't think I've ever been as scared of anything as I was down in that mine shaft."

"You didn't show it," he said.

She grinned. "That's half of what they teach you in officer's training. You can't panic when there are people depending on you."

"I could never do that. I mean, I'd pick up a gun to defend myself, and I'd enlist if there was a need, but I'm not officer material."

"I haven't proven that I am, either," she replied. "Still just a baby birdie."

"Is that what they call cadets?"

"They usually call us some version of fraggin' baby birdies," she said, and they both snickered.

They had fresh berries and cream for dessert; even people who didn't eat a lot of fresh fruit when it was available started craving it after being deprived a while. Not even reconstituted cream could take away from the gloriously sweet berries grown in Mars Base's garden levels.

Neither of them wanted the evening to end. Anna excused herself to the ladies' room so she could call Star's private channel.

Nightstar and Lodestone were also deciding what to do next. Star answered the call silently, hoping that Anna didn't want an excuse to leave.

Instead, her friend sounded nervous but happy. "Star, what do you think of them—I mean, really? They're a package deal just like we are, and I—Jordan and I are thinking of going somewhere together, but I don't know—"

"I like Lodestone. I—I really like the way we mesh, I think I want to get to know him better. Is that OK, what do you think of Jordan?"

"I like him a lot. He isn't put off because I'm military, and we're both interested in each other's plans. I want to get to know him better, too."

"Lodes found this nice...private...place out in the badlands that he wants to show me. Will you be OK if I go?"

"I'll be fine. I'll make sure we go to a safe place. I'll ping you in the morning...what time do you think?"

"I don't know, what if we meet up say half a joor before we report back to the shuttle? We can all have lunch together and maybe see a show or something."

"That sounds good to me!" Anna said.

"Annie, if it doesn't turn out the way you want, then call me. I'll have my comms filtered, but they won't be off completely, I'll still hear it ring no matter what."

"He's got a broken leg, Star. I'll be fine. Are you sure about going off with Lodestone?"

"He knows I'm Ironhide and Chromia's daughter," she replied.

Both of them giggled, then Anna put her phone away and went back to Jordan.

This felt different from any other date she'd gone on that she knew might get serious. For one thing, the outcome would not affect only her and Jordan, but also Star and Lodestone. If they all hit it off, this could be the beginning of a cohort—a family of their own.

Beyond that,in Jordan's company, she felt something that had never been present with any of her other potential boyfriends.

She still didn't believe in love at first sight. But she was beginning to feel like this was a guy that she _could_ fall in love with. And that was both wonderful and scary.

Outside the dome, Lodestone considered the best way to get to what he hoped would soon be their favorite getaway. "Do you think your alt could fit in my ore carrier form's cargo space?"

"Maybe. As pickup trucks go I'm not that big. Transform and let me see."

They soon found that wouldn't work. His cargo space was long enough, but her cab was a little too tall. He transformed to digger mode, which had tracks like Shaker and Firecracker. "It would be easier to fly there, but it isn't that far from the dome."

"Lead the way!" she smiled.

They took a narrow dirt road that wound through the canyons. Eventually the canyon they were following narrowed until they occasionally had to transform to root mode to get through.

The raw, untamed beauty of the barren landscape was something Star didn't think she would ever take for granted. She and Anna had first seen it as younglings, up here with their families when Mars Base first opened. It was just as awe-inspiring as it had been then.

She stopped to capture a few images. "Were you exploring this place between trips?"

"No, actually, I was working out here. You know there are water deposits underground here? I was prospecting for those for the settlement. If they're not too deep and they're large enough, they're a less energy-intensive water source than collecting ice from the outer bands of the solar system."

"I never realized."

"The base isn't quite a closed system. They recycle all they can, but they still have to import water." He barely squeaked through a narrow place into a cul-de-sac at the end of the canyon. "And then I found this. Look up there."

There were vertical marks on one side of the canyon. She approached to study it more closely. "Why, those are water marks!"

"Yes. When I came down here, there was water running down the side of that cliff, soaking into the sand at the bottom. Most of it sublimated, the air pressure isn't high enough for water. But at the exact time same time I was here—it was here too. I think that was really _something_. No one believed me until I exported the video."

Star grinned. "It was like Mother Nature let you in on a secret."

"It's exactly like that!"

That was when Star figured out what it was that so attracted her to Lodestone. It was that sense of discovery. There was an innocence in that, all out of proportion to the desperate circumstances under which he'd grown up. He could still be amazed by a gigantic geode, awed by an unexpected trickle of water. Potentially, there was wonder all around him, and he was open to finding it.

Star didn't have that, and she knew she never would. She had grown up learning how to survive, to lead, to win. The daughter of Ironhide and Chromia really couldn't have grown up to be anything other than a warrior. Lodestone was her opposite, the other side of the coin, and she knew to her spark that it took two sides to make a coin complete.

It was too soon. But, someday, when the time was right, she would tell him how happy it made her to know someone who showed her beautiful crystals, and the promise of life on a dry, dead world.

Eventually, the time came to get back to the shuttle to the _Chicago. _Jordan and Lodestone walked with them as far as the entrance to the EDF area. Nobody was in any hurry to leave, but the clock kept ticking. They parted with numerous pleas to be careful, and checked three or four times to make sure they had one another's contact information.

The cadets joined a large group of their shipmates at the airlock to the boarding tube.

Anna reached up to touch Star's forearm plate. "Where are Shaker and the others? I don't see them."

Star scanned, confirmed her observation, and pinged her cohort leader. ::Shaker? Where are you guys?::

Instead of the answer she expected, there was a buzz, then a canned voice broadcast, ::This user blocked by brig regulations.::

Startled, she tried it again, thinking she must have pinged the wrong bot. When she got the same reply, she tried the rest of her cohort—with the same result.

"Anna, they're in the _brig!"_

"What the hell are they doing in the brig?"

"Your guess is as good as mine."

Anna dialed their CO. "LT, we can't get hold of Shaker and the others, and Star thinks they're in the brig!"

"Slaggers got drunk and got in a fuckin' bar fight! Report to my office as soon as you get back aboard the _Shytown!"_

Anna winced. "Sir, yes sir!"

Star had only heard one side of the conversation. "What happened?"

"They got into a fight. Coriell wants us in her office."

"What did we do?"

"I don't know yet," Anna replied. Panic tried to get started. They were going to get kicked out of the academy and their parents were going to kill them—slowly! She controlled that, they needed to find out what had actually happened, then go into damage control. Though if the rest of the gang was already in the brig, it was probably too late for damage control...

Star said miserably, "We're going to be guarding a snowball at Elmendorf for the next ten vorn. We leave them alone for _one fraggin' night_ and look what happens."

"Skyrocket."

"Or Firecracker."

"Yeah, one or the other," the human agreed.

The airlock opened and they trudged through like prisoners on their way to the firing squad.

…."Thought you had better sense than to pull a stunt like this! Earthshaker, what do you have to say for yourself?"

The cadets stood at attention in front of a raised platform on the bridge where Col. Brewster, the captain of the ship, stood glaring at them. Beside him, Coriell could have been carved from steel. Earthshaker said, "Sir, no excuse, sir."

Star and Anna stood with the others. They hadn't even been there during the fight, it wasn't their problem—but this was their cohort, and if they had been present, they might have been able to prevent the whole thing from happening in the first place.

Brewster was glad they had the sense not to try to weasel out of it. Everyone made mistakes, but the way they handled those mistakes told him a lot about their character. "Your conduct was unacceptable. You could have harmed or killed civilians, and Firecracker, Dr. Vance tells me you came within a centimeter of an injury that could have crippled you. I hope you kids realize how lucky you were! We have to take risks to do our job, that's unavoidable. But I won't have my people adding to the chance they'll go home in storage because they haven't got the common sense the good Lord gave a goose! Unnecessary foolishness like this is not going to happen again on my watch, is that clear?"

"Sir, yes, sir!"

"Report to Major Crystallia after your duty joor for punishment detail. Now, you've all got somewhere you're supposed to be—I suggest you get there _yesterday!"_

They scrambled to obey. It was only after the hatch slid closed behind them that Brewster and Coriell burst into laughter. Brewster asked, "Who won the fight?"

"According to the bartender, sir, they were too slagged to keep score," the lieutenant snorted.

"Fraggin' baby birdies," Brewster said, shaking his head.

He would never admit to some of the things he had done in Colorado Springs in the old days. Not to the cadets, anyway.

Crystallia put them to work scouring every square inch of the cargo holds.

Fifteen clicks in, Skyrocket was whining about it.

Shaker's temper finally snapped and he threw a scrub brush at the young seeker's helm. "Shut it, you fraggin' idiot! This is our careers here! Star and Anna weren't even with us, this wasn't _their_ fault, and they're here too! You two lugnuts coulda got John and Dragonfly killed! And you're _whining_ about it? Shut it! For that matter, you screw this up, it isn't just us, it's the whole rest of the cohort too—it's gonna look bad on the Mini Twins and Toby and Shawna! And it'll look bad on our parents, too! You're not a couple of kids playin' on the beach anymore! You need to grow the Pit up!"

A subdued Skyrocket gave the brush back. "I'm sorry, Shaker. I never meant for things to get out of hand."

Firecracker said, "I'm sorry, too."

"I know. You mechs just have to start using your processors. This is the kind of stuff that rest of us can't just make it go away. The captain was right. People could die."

Both of them nodded, and Shaker could tell from their fields that any further yelling at the two of them would be counterproductive. He took out his anger on a grease spot.

After they had a chance to think about it, Skyrocket and Firecracker took the lectures to heart. Firecracker woke up and smelled the energon when he replayed his memory of the fight and saw that bar stool headed John's way through sober optics. Skyrocket took a few joors longer, but his sister was mad at him, and he took that seriously. Both of them paid attention to Shaker, who rarely got that ticked off at them. But they had to admit, after they thought it over, that they'd given him a reason. After that, the whole cohort agreed when they went out drinking, one person would stay sober, and when that person decided the rest had had enough, the bar was closed.

A few days of spending their off hours cleaning cargo holds was enough, but Crystallia wasn't going to turn down the chance to get all the nooks and crannies cleaner than they'd ever been. Once they finished the holds, she started them on the Jeffries tubes and other access areas.

Eventually, the captain decided they'd learned their lesson and let them off punishment detail. A few days after that, Shaker had a bridge rotation. After his shift ended, Brewster called the young mech into his office.

Shaker was nervous as he reported, wondering what they could have done now. But Brewster put him at ease. "Cadet, we'll be back to Diego Highport in half an orn. Have you and your cohort thought about what you'd like to do after you graduate?"

"We'll be glad to go wherever the Fleet needs us, Captain. Of course we hope to get the same assignment, but we've always understood that might not be possible after we graduate."

"It's very likely, but your assignment might be a base or space station instead of a ship."

"Sir. I wasn't expecting to have a choice of assignments."

"That isn't always possible, but this time, it just might be. How do cohorts handle it if you do need to make a decision, will you each decide individually or will you decide for the entire group?"

"If we have the opportunity, sir, we'll talk it over and decide as a cohort. I think the one thing I can say for all of us, sir, is that we want to go where we'll be most useful, and if that means we need to be stationed in different places, so be it."

"As it so happens, the Fleet finds the way you worked as a team during the mine rescue to be very useful. And that incident at Lobbsters' proved that there can be consequences when you get split up."

Shaker's cooling fans kicked on in embarrassment. "Sir."

"Relax, Cadet. That wasn't as bad as it could have been, you've served your punishment, and I believe you've learned your lesson."

"Thank you, sir."

"One of the responsibilities of a good leader is being aware of his squad's weaknesses, as well as their strengths. You've been blessed with a couple of live wires. If you stay out of the hooch when they're drinking, you'll simplify your life considerably."

"Yes, sir."

Brewster considered telling the cadet about the assignment the high command was considering for his cohort, but nothing was set in stone yet. He decided to let them think about it, and if the choices they were finally offered after graduation were something entirely different, they wouldn't be disappointed.

Shana Coriell was always surprised at the change in her cadets over the short time they were on board the _Shytown._ They came aboard as wide-eyed or bright-opticked college kids, but they left as EDF officers. Of this current crop, only Dragonfly was physically different, having transitioned from a youngling to an adult femme. But the dangers and hardships that they had faced and overcome had changed all of them. She saw it in the way they held themselves, in the confidence in their bearing, the steady way they looked her in the eye. Their parents would be getting back grown-ups in place of the kids they'd said goodbye to three short months ago.

She looked at Firecracker and Skyrocket, and inwardly sighed. Well, in some cases, as grown-up as they were likely to ever get.

They waited in the docking bay for their shuttle to Diego Garcia Highport, and from there back to the Academy_._

They dropped into the ebb and flow of docking bay traffic with the ease and familiarity of experienced spacers, no longer greenhorns. Dragonfly and Skyrocket were surrounded by the Wolf Pack; they had truly become part of the squadron and now proudly wore the squadron patch painted on their armor. All aviators collected those patches as they moved through the Fleet, a proud visual _curriculum vitae _which instantly told other aviators who they were and where they had served.

A horn sounded, alerting everyone that the shuttle was about to dock. Her baby birdies lined up to leave the nest. Coriell wasn't one for long goodbyes. She told them, "Good job, Cadets. You have exactly seventeen days until graduation. Try to stay out of trouble that long!"

"Sir! Yes, sir!"

"I'll see you then. Good trip."

They all saluted, and she returned it, then dismissed them. She watched them kick off and fly across the bay to join the line of others waiting to disembark.

They'd do just fine.

They had a few hours' layover at the Highport before there was another shuttle bound planetside. Annabelle Lennox sat on a hard bench and composed an email to Jordan Wilson.

"Hi, Jordan, we're back on Diego Highport waiting on our flight home. I'm excited about graduation coming up, and Star and I really wish you and Lodestone could be here. We'll send pictures but it isn't the same thing. We'll have to wait and see where we're assigned after that. They say we should know within a week after graduation. I'll email you as soon as I hear something.

"I was glad to hear that you and your cohort were able to get an engineer to survey the asteroid so quickly. It really makes me feel better about you working on it again, now that I know you won't be going down there until the engineer determines that it's safe. I'll still worry, though. So I understand what you meant about worrying about Star and me. But try not to. The Fleet looks after its own and they really don't want us taking any silly chances.

"I can't wait to see my family again, but I also can't wait to see you again. I just know I'm going to spend the rest of my leaves bouncing back and forth between Diego and the Rocks like a ping-pong ball. :D I hope we get assigned to the Fleet rather than a base, but if it's a base, I hope it's Mars Base."

She stared at the screen, unsure how to close the email. She wanted to type "Love, Anna" but it was too soon for that. Jordan hadn't said it to her yet, and she wasn't sure if he wanted to, or who was supposed to say it first. Finally she typed, "See you soon, Anna."

She hoped, as she pressed send, that he would read between the lines.

John came over with slices of hot pizza and cans of soda. It was real pizza, not the flash-frozen stuff they'd occasionally had aboard ship. Here, there was enough traffic to fly up fresh food from the Downport every day. She closed her eyes as she bit into it. Heaven!

"Did you get hold of your mom?"

John shook his head. "She's on duty. I'll see her when we get in this evening. What about your mom and dad?"

"Mom's always swamped finals week, and Dad's at Nellis. I'll just surprise Mom when we get in, she's not expecting us until tomorrow since we made better time than we expected out of Mars Base."

"What's that smile about?"

Anna played innocent. "Nothing. Nothing at all."

"Wouldn't have anything to do with that miner, would it?"

"And so what if it did?"

John grinned. "Nothing. I was just wondering, that's all."

Anna smiled, and put the phone back in her pocket, and returned her attention to her pizza.

Outside, the _Chicago _lay quiescent in her slip, like a hooded hawk on her perch: a bird of prey waiting to return to her true home among the stars. Like her sister ships and the crews aboard them, she would soon return to her duties defending the new colonies of humans and mecha, carrying both. Never before had civilization joined two such disparate races , nor sent them out among the stars, and the Fleet would proudly lead the way.

The End


End file.
